Deriving anteriority in the perfect of recent past
Most Romance languages share a grammaticalized construction to refer to events in the recent past, e.g. the passé
récent in French and the pasado reciente in Spanish. In English, typically a present
perfect alongside the adverb just is used to convey this meaning, commonly referred to as
perfect of recent past (Comrie 1985) or hot news
perfect (McCawley 1971). We show the French passé récent
leads to a reading of immediate anteriority, which blocks readings that are available for the passé composé
(Bres & Labeau 2015). In a parallel corpus study, we find that the Spanish and
French recent past forms have a similar distribution, and the Germanic languages generally use
perfect + just in translation. We then provide a DRT analysis to derive immediate anteriority compositionally.
Article outline
- 1.From recent past to perfect
- 2.A Reichenbachian analysis of the passé récent
- 3.The recent past in translation
- 4.The role of
just
in the perfect of recent past
- 4.1English just
- 4.2Dutch zojuist and net
- 4.3German (so)eben and gerade
- 5.A compositional semantics of the perfect of recent past
- 6.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
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van der Klis, Martijn, Bert Le Bruyn & Henriette E. de Swart
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