Deriving anteriority in the perfect of recent past
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.
Article outline
- 1.From recent past to perfect
- 2.A Reichenbachian analysis of the passé récent
- 3.The recent past in translation
- 4.The role of
just
in the perfect of recent past
- 4.1English just
- 4.2Dutch zojuist and net
- 4.3German (so)eben and gerade
- 5.A compositional semantics of the perfect of recent past
- 6.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
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