Perfect Puzzles in Discourse
Résumé
This chapter examines two puzzles concerning perfect structures. Pancheva and von Stechow offer solutions to these puzzles based on semantic constraints on the overlap between event time, reference time, and the perfect time span of a perfect. Asher and Guéron argue that neither puzzle requires semantic contraints on tenses. The (parametrized) Present Perfect puzzle reduces to the presence/absence of aspect morphemes in the functional repertory of a language. The more general Past Perfect puzzle depends not on sentence grammar but on information structure, more precisely, on discourse relations implied by focused material in successive sentences. The discourse relations defined in the SDRT model of Asher and Lascarides account for all the data presented by the earlier chapters and for more extensive data beyond the span of earlier proposals.