Anteriority versus Extended-Now: Theories

There are two main theories of the German Perfect. According to the first theory, the Perfect expresses anteriority. The second theory, in contrast, maintains that the Perfect denotes an Extended-Now-interval. I will discuss these theories in sections 1 and 2. In section 3, I will present my own analysis of the German Perfect. Section 4 summarizes the results. 2. The Anteriority-Theory of the German Perfect: E<R Reichenbach (1947) introduces three parameters for the analysis of tense: event time (E), reference time (R) and speech time (S). Let me illustrate these with the help of the following example: (1) Zu dieser Zeit hatte die Katze die Maus schon gefangen at that time had the cat the mouse already caught 'At that time, the cat had already caught the mouse' A Reichenbachian analysis of (1) goes as follows. On a time axis, the event time E is located somewhere before the speech time S. In addition, E is also located before a time which is referred to by zu dieser Zeit. This time is the reference time R. The diagram below shows the scenario for (1) (the arrow represents the time axis)