Towards a cross-linguistic, compositional semantics of the recent past

Activity: Talk or presentationPoster/paper presentationAcademic

Description

Cross-linguistically, the perfect of recent past (e.g. “Mary has just left the party”) forms an interesting category. In some Romance languages, this PERFECT can be expressed with a grammaticalized construction (in French venir de + infinitive and in Spanish acabar de + infinitive) that is used to express immediate anteriority (Bres & Labeau, 2015). In contrast, in Germanic languages, a present perfect requires adverbs (like just in English (Lee, 1991) and gerade in German (Schaden & Tovena, 2009)) to signal this kind of recency.Earlier research (Schaden, 2009) suggests that the pairs French/German and Spanish/English are alike in their use of the PERFECT. However, as we have just seen, the Romance languages, although having a different distribution of the PERFECT, both grammaticalize the recent past. After applying a computational methodology from van der Klis et al. (2017) on the Europarl corpus (Tiedemann, 2012) and taking stock of the cross-linguistic differences, we will be able to provide a compositional semantics of the perfect of recent past.
Period3 Feb 2018
Event titleGrote Taaldag 2018
Event typeConference
LocationUtrecht, NetherlandsShow on map