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Article published In: Linguistics in the Netherlands 2018
Edited by Bert Le Bruyn and Janine Berns
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 35] 2018
► pp. 35–50

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Deriving anteriority in the perfect of recent past

 | Utrecht University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 3 December 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00003.kli
Abstract
Most Romance languages share a grammaticalized construction to refer to events in the recent past, e.g. the passé récent in French and the pasado reciente in Spanish. In English, typically a present perfect alongside the adverb just is used to convey this meaning, commonly referred to as perfect of recent past (Comrie, Bernard. 1985. Tense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) or hot news perfect (McCawley, James. D. 1971. “Tense and time reference in English”. Studies in linguistic semantics, ed. by C. J. Fillmore & D. T. Langendoen, 96–113. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). We show the French passé récent leads to a reading of immediate anteriority, which blocks readings that are available for the passé composé (Bres, Jacques, & Emmanuelle Labeau. 2015. “Venir de (+ infinitive): An immediate anteriority marker in French”. Diachronica, 32 (4): 530–570. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). In a parallel corpus study, we find that the Spanish and French recent past forms have a similar distribution, and the Germanic languages generally use perfect + just in translation. We then provide a DRT analysis to derive immediate anteriority compositionally.
Article outline
  • 1.From recent past to perfect
  • 2.A Reichenbachian analysis of the passé récent
  • 3.The recent past in translation
  • 4.The role of just in the perfect of recent past
    • 4.1English just
    • 4.2Dutch zojuist and net
    • 4.3German (so)eben and gerade
  • 5.A compositional semantics of the perfect of recent past
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (18)
References
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Raoprasert, Thatchanon & Athip Thumvichit
2024. Decoding French equivalents of the English present perfect: evidence from parallel corpora of parliamentary documents. Linguistics Vanguard 10:1 ► pp. 655 ff. DOI logo
van der Klis, Martijn, Bert Le Bruyn & Henriette E. de Swart
2020. Chapter 2. De la sémantique des temps verbaux à la traductologie. In The Expression of Tense, Aspect, Modality and Evidentiality in Albert Camus’sL'Étrangerand Its Translations /L'Étrangerde Camus et ses traductions : questions de temps, d'aspect, de modalité et d'évidentialité (TAME) [Lingvisticæ Investigationes Supplementa, 35], ► pp. 12 ff. DOI logo

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