The Present Perfect in English: Meaning, Interpretation and Use

This thesis is an investigation of the present perfect construction in Modern English (the auxiliary 'have' + past participle). It examines the construction’s context-independent meaning alongside speaker inferences derived from the interplay between this meaning, the linguistic environment and non-linguistic knowledge. It also explores the construction’s variation in register, space and time. The discussion is founded on the inferential account of communication, and specifically, on the theoretical notion of relevance proposed in relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995). The analysis is based on both introspective and naturally occurring data. Chapter 1 lays the conceptual foundation of the thesis, introducing the general background, aims and approach of the research and important linguistic terminologies. Chapter 2 discusses several key features of the English present perfect and presents a critical evaluation of existing analyses. Chapter 3 introduces the theoretical framework of the thesis. It outlines a perfect-state account of the construction’s semantics and proposes a discourse-pragmatic principle governing its interpretation and use in context. It is argued that the relevance-seeking inferential mechanism is responsible for value assignment of the perfect state. Chapter 4 elaborates on the semantic-pragmatic proposal by demonstrating its capacity to accommodate and account for the key features discussed in Chapter 2, as well as patterns of dialectal variation and grammaticalisation. Chapters 5 and 6 further explore how the proposal sheds light onto the construction’s variation across three native varieties of English (British, American and Australian), a range of spoken and written registers, and three time periods (1750-1799, 1850-1899 and 1950-1999). By conducting systematic analysis of corpus data, significant dialectal and register variation has been revealed. It is found that register variation in the use of the present perfect can be attributed to interaction with various clausal elements. In addition, there has been a tendency since the late 18th century for the construction, in particular its resultative use, to be taken over by the simple past tense, a process underpinned by functional shifts triggered by context-induced inferencing.