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The Perfect in spoken and written English
Author(s) -
Miller Jim
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
transactions of the philological society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.333
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-968X
pISSN - 0079-1636
DOI - 10.1111/1467-968x.00067
Subject(s) - resultative , linguistics , interrogative , interpretation (philosophy) , present perfect , computer science , simple (philosophy) , property (philosophy) , key (lock) , philosophy , epistemology , verb , computer security
The Perfect in standard written English has been well‐described, usually in terms of the four interpretations Result, Experiential, Recent Past and Persistent Situation. The Result interpretation is difficult to apply to examples from real texts, and the notion of consequence as a key property of the Perfect is problematic for clauses containing yet and ever and for interrogative and negative clauses. The other interpretations are regularly signalled by the simple past in informal spoken English. In particular the resultative construction that is the historical source of the Perfect has survived and there is a range of resultative structures built around resultative‐passive participles.