https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5566-9076
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ABSTRACT
Previous research on the Present Perfect suggests that the latter is acceptable in since-clauses only if the situation expressed by the subordinate clause extends in time up until the present, as in Tony has been happy since he has been taking Prozac, i.e. if the Present Perfect in the since-clause is a Universal Perfect whose predication is true at all subintervals in the time-interval delimited by since and not an Existential Perfect whose predication is true only at a certain moment therein, as in *Tony has been happy since he has visited Cape Cod. The present study puts the implications of this claim and others found in the literature to the empirical test through an examination of all of the 2,621 occurrences of the Present Perfect in since-clauses with pronominal subjects in the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. A significant proportion of the data is shown to contradict the generalizations proposed in previous studies. An explanation capable of accounting for all of the uses of the Present Perfect in since-clauses is put forward based on the complex meaning of this verbal structure which involves the notion of present stative after-phase of a past situation. The Present Perfect is possible in a since-clause whenever the beginning of the after-phase serves to mark the beginning-point in the past from which the main-clause situation unfolds towards the present. The beginning of the after-phase is argued to be interpretable in two ways: either as the first moment after the end of the prior situation or as the first moment in the process of accruing the after-phase itself.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study were derived from the referenced resources available in the public domain.
Notes
1 Due to the fact that the term ‘event’ is used by many authors to denote only actions and the term ‘situation’ naturally suggests a state, we have coined the term ‘situaction’ to replace these two terms so as to have a word that covers both states and actions at the same time.
2 The meaning of Perfective is that the VP is true at some interval t_ which is a subinterval of the time of evaluation t (e.g. Bill insulted Tony). Conversely, the meaning of Imperfective is that the VP is true at an interval t_ which is a superinterval of t (e.g. Bill was insulting Tony).
3 “The temporal zero-point is the time from which all the temporal relations expressed by a tense ultimately take their starting point. It is usually speech time” (Declerck, Citation2006, p. 97).
4 The Corpus of Contemporary American English now contains one billion words; at the time of the data collection for this study, it only had 600 million.
5 Since the Present Perfect Progressive has already been dealt with by von Fintel and Iatridou, it is not investigated in this study. Consequently, the aspectual opposition between Perfective and Imperfective is not relevant to the present investigation.
6 Here is the search string that was used: since _p* has/have/’s/’ve _v?n*.
7 Search string = since _p* _v?d*.
8 It should be noted that there was also a risk of some cases being missed by POS-tagging errors, since the two corpora were tagged automatically and not manually. In addition, the query did not retrieve interpolated adverbs, as in It has been a while since I have truly trained for one.
9 See the Appendix for a detailed explication of these calculations.
10 For this reason, we have certain reservations concerning the concept of ‘coercion’, as it implies that the context in which a verb is used may force the latter into a lexical Aktionsart class that it does not naturally belong to. We return to this in more detail at the end of §4.2.
11 The following were classified as acquired permanent states:
Since they have known that their condition was capable of improvement, their progress in useful knowledge has been rapid and uniform. (BNC)
Every Saturday morning he took her shopping with him, and this ritual became very important to her. Since she has been grown-up she has told me how she remembers those Saturday mornings and how she loved them. (BNC)
12 The example below was from an interview with Swedish jazz pianist Esbjorn Svensson, and so was not an ideal attestation, although it expresses the same kind of message:
And I guess that was kind of a start, but at the same time, my father has a lot of – he’s a real jazz freak. He’s been playing Parker, Ellington, Basie, Monk since I’ve grown up. And at the same time, my mother was playing classical piano. So I’m kind of mixed up with that. Plus, my own music; that was rock’n’roll when I was growing up. (COCA)
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Patrick Duffley
Patrick Duffley, Professor of English Linguistics at Laval University, has published monographs on semantics, syntax and English non-finite verb-forms, as well as articles on modals, wh-words, negative polarity and indefinite determiners. His work utilizes concepts inspired by Cognitive Grammar and takes the fundamental task of linguistics to be deducing the nature of the cognitive content stably attached to the linguistic sign. In 2014 he published a monograph with John Benjamins proposing a semantico-pragmatic explanation of the syntactic phenomenon of subject vs. non-subject control (Reclaiming Control as a Semantic and Pragmatic Phenomenon). In 2020 Oxford University Press published his introduction to semantics entitled Linguistic Meaning Meets Linguistic Form predicated on the non-autonomy of syntax from semantics.
Gabrielle Morin
Gabrielle Morin has a BA in TESL and an MA in English Linguistics from Laval University. She currently holds an administrative position with Dimension Composite in Saint-Georges, Quebec.