Through a corpus of over 12 million words from television and radio interviews in the U.S., this study classes the use of discourse-pragmatic functions of 268 present perfect (PP) tokens. From this assay, one use excels superbly: the PP in the use of position-taking or support. Also, only very seldom was the PP used to start narratives, which does not conform to prior grasps. The study adds to the total knowledge of PP use and has implications for how the tense can be taught to English language learners.