Since Kamp & Rohrer (1983), the literature on tense use in discourse focuses on story telling: sequences of events create narrative progress, and states provide background descriptions. In contrast to the anaphoric, definite nature of the Simple Past, Partee (1973, 1984) analyses the Present Perfect as quantificational and indefinite. This view is in line with the non-narrative character of the PERFECT as a typological category (Bybee et al. 1994, Lindstedt 2000). However, cross-linguistic variation complicates the picture: according to de Swart (2007) and Schaden (2009), German and French make a more liberal use of the PERFECT than English and Spanish, especially in narrative contexts. A better understanding of the prototypical and non-prototypical conditions of use of the PERFECT is crucial for building a cross-linguistically robust semantics. Rather than focusing on constructed examples, we investigate actual use in a parallel corpus. Under the assumption that translators aim to render the meaning in context in the target language, form variation between original and translation can inform us of the semantics and pragmatics of the various verb forms.
In this talk, we report results on tense use in J.K. Rowling’s book Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and its Dutch, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Swedish translations. We chose this novel as our parallel corpus, because it has both narrative parts and dialogue. We find that the discourse has a ‘classic’ narrative style which fits the analysis proposed by Kamp & Rohrer (1983) and Partee (1973, 1984). The dialogues are short, but they feel like ‘natural’ spoken language, so we use them to generate a multilingual conversational corpus.
PERFECT forms are exclusively found in the dialogue parts of Harry Potter, and do not appear in narrative discourse. This pattern was found in all translations under investigation. The frequency with which the PERFECT is used in dialogue varies across languages, though. The Swedish and Spanish translations are fairly close to the English original, but Dutch and German make a wider usage of the PERFECT to report events in the past (Le Bruyn et al. 2019). Dutch avoids the PERFECT in narrative sequences, though, in contrast to French and Italian where the PERFECT replaces the PERFECTIVE PAST in dialogue. The talk reflects on the dynamic semantics of the PERFECT: what do PERFECTS ‘do’ in conversation?
References
Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins & William Pagliuca (1994). The evolution of grammar: tense, aspect and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kamp, Hans & Christian Rohrer 1983. Tense in texts. In: Rainer Bäuerle, Christian Schwarze & Arnim von Stechow (eds.). Meaning, Use, and Interpretation of Language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 250–269.
Lindstedt, Jouko (2000). The perfect - aspectual, temporal and evidential, in: Östen Dahl (ed.). Tense and Aspect in the languages of Europe, Berlin: De Gruyter, 365-383.
Le Bruyn, Bert, Martijn van der Klis & Henriëtte de Swart (2019). The perfect in dialogue: evidence from Dutch, Linguistics in the Netherlands 36.
Partee, Barbara (1973). Some structural analogies between tenses and pronouns in English, Journal of Philosophy 70, 601-609.
Partee, Barbara (1984). Nominal and temporal anaphora, Linguistics & Philosophy 7, 243-286.
Schaden, Gerhard (2009). Present perfects compete, Linguistics and Philosophy 32, 115-141.
de Swart, Henriëtte (2007). A cross-linguistic discourse analysis of the perfect. Journal of Pragmatics 39, 2273-2307.
| Period | 7 Feb 2020 |
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| Event title | Beyond Time : Non-prototypical uses of aspectual constructions in (more or) less typical environments |
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| Event type | Workshop |
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| Conference number | 2 |
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| Location | Brussels, BelgiumShow on map |
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| Degree of Recognition | International |
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- semantics
- parallel corpora
- aspect