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Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2018
Edited by Bert Le Bruyn and Janine Berns
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 35] 2018
► pp. 35–50

Deriving anteriority in the perfect of recent past

| Utrecht University

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.

Keywords: recent past, hot news perfect, translation, compositional semantics, DRT
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
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 3 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00003.kli
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van der Klis, Martijn, Bert Le Bruyn & Henriette E. de Swart
2020. Chapter 2. De la sémantique des temps verbaux à la traductologie. In The Expression of Tense, Aspect, Modality and Evidentiality in Albert Camus’sL'Étrangerand Its Translations /L'Étrangerde Camus et ses traductions : questions de temps, d'aspect, de modalité et d'évidentialité (TAME) [Lingvisticæ Investigationes Supplementa, 35], ► pp. 12 ff. DOI logo

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