Deriving anteriority in the perfect of recent past

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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 1985) or hot news perfect (McCawley 1971). We show the French passé récent leads to a reading of immediate anteriority, which blocks readings that are available for the passé composé (Bres & Labeau 2015). 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.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)35-50
Number of pages16
JournalLinguistics in the Netherlands
Volume35
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 3 Dec 2018

Keywords

  • hot news perfect
  • recent past
  • compositional semantics
  • translation
  • DRT

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