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Part of
The Perfect Volume: Papers on the perfect
Edited by Kristin Melum Eide and Marc Fryd
[Studies in Language Companion Series 217] 2021
► pp. 181–212

Chapter 8
More on hodiernality

| Escola Oficial d’Idiomes, Barcelona

This paper builds on previous work and aims to examine one of the most striking differences between the uses of the present perfect in languages such as Catalan and English, namely, a hodiernal (‘today’) reading of the perfect available under certain conditions in these Romance languages but not in English. I will specifically look into (1) the competition between tenses, (2) the role of temporal modification, and (3) the present tense. Taking into account the semantics of the present tense and a split of the perfect time interval and the reference time as in Pancheva & von Stechow (2004), I will claim that the main difference that distinguishes the hodiernal reading is due to a possible specification of the event time on a fixed position on the time line.

Keywords: hodiernal, perfect, present, perfect time span, even time modification
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The competition between the perfect and the past
  • 3.The role of temporal modification
    • 3.1Proximate demonstrative + cyclic-calendar noun
  • 4.The role of the present tense
  • 5.The role of the present tense matters in perfect constructions
  • 6.Deriving the hodiernal reading
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.217.08xiq
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[no author supplied]
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