Perfect Explorations (review)

Perfect explorations, with its fourteen articles including the introduction, tries to answer complicated questions about the perfect aspect using data from English, Greek, German, Bulgarian, Italian, Arabic, and Russian. The book is written within a uniform semantic and syntactic formalism, introduced in the opening chapter by the editors. Some articles, though, present a pragmatic and historical view on the perfect (Amalia Moser, Ioannis Veloudis). The common formal tools used by the authors from article to article and from language to language form a neat picture throughout the book.

Semantically, Hans Reichenbach’s S (speech), R (reference), and E (event) times are applied to the description of both tense and aspect. However, problems accompany this approach; therefore, the writers also appeal to Arthur Prior’s tenses as operators and Barbara Partee’s and Irene Heim’s tenses as variables:

(1) ‖PAST_i‖^g,n = g(i), if g(i) is a time before the time of speech n, undefined otherwise.

(2) ‖PRES_i‖^g,n = g(i), if g(i) is a time identical with n, undefined otherwise.

The perfect is subjected to more than one classification: (a) universal, experiential, resultative; and (b) have-perfect, be-perfect. There are further gradations within the latter: have-perfect can be as XN (extended now) or Priorian past; be-perfect can represent target states or resultant states.

Syntactically, a common T/A/A architecture is accepted throughout the book, namely:

(3) Tense > Perfect > Aspect VP.

Thus, the shared terminology of the volume makes it possible for the authors, exploring different languages and presenting seemingly different problems, to isolate recurrent issues in the research into the perfect. The main questions addressed in the book are:

(1) Is perfect a tense or an aspect? The answers to this question vary from article to article and from language to language. For Abdelkader Fassi Fehri and Arabic it is some ‘relative’ T or T2. For Amalia Moser and Greek it is also temporal rather than aspectual in character. For other writers there is a complex interplay among viewpoint aspect, Aktionsart, morphological form of the construction, and tense (Fabrizio Arosio, Fassi Fehri, Roumyana Pancheva, and Alla Paslawska and Arnim von Stechow). Different ways of combining all of these factors yield different perfect readings. And this leads to another big issue of the volume:

(2) How uniform is the perfect? Being a complex phenomenon, uniting aspectual and temporal properties of the verb and using different morphological tools for its formation, perfect has been subdivided into three to four types: universal (sometimes called XNperfect), experiential, resultative (Pancheva), and recent past (Sabine Iatridou, Elena Anagnosto-poulou, and Roumyana Izvorski). Monika Rathert does not classify the existential perfect into smaller subtypes and discusses the universal/existential dichotomy.

(3) What contribution to perfect readings is made by adverbials? Different authors discuss different adverbials from different points of view. Arosio analyzes Italian per-adverbials and da-adverbials and their combinatory properties with respect to temporal predicates; although both adverbials are durative, the output they produce on combining with the predicates is nonhomogenous and homogenous respectively, which gives the writer a basis for dividing Italian perfect tenses into Perfect I and Perfect II. Fassi Fehri studies the relationships between TA morphology and positional and durational adverbials. Perfect readings depend on the kind of adverbial, as is the case in other languages, for instance, Greek until (Anastasia Giannakidou), English since (Iatridou), German seit (Renate Musan).

(4) How is the perfect participle formed and how do we distinguish between stative and eventive perfect participles? Following Angelika Kratzer (‘Building statives’, Berkeley Linguistics Society 26.385–99, 2000), Anagnostopoulou not only subdivides Greek perfect participles into adjectival (stative) or verbal (eventive), she also makes a distinction within adjectival participles (target state and resultant state), depending on the character of different...