This study compares one aspect of the English verbal system, namely the meaning of “result” closely associated with the present perfect, with the situation in Portuguese. The comparison is made bidirectionally using the COMPARA corpus, consisting of parallel literary texts (English-Portuguese and Portuguese-English). The structure of the corpus allows comparisons to be made not only between source and target texts, but also between translations and original texts. The author concludes that while little attention is paid to result in Portuguese, compared to English, other distinctions and patterns are apparent. Her more general point is that a parallel corpus facilitates contrastive studies of a semantic kind, which help to identify complex differences even between related languages.