Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1992, Page 134

132
Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson
to have to rely on what I remember from reading it in high
school.
On its own, a sentence like (3) is most naturally understood as an
existential perfect according to McCawley, but embedded in a context
like (4) it is clearly to be understood as a resultative perfect.
These examples demonstrate the close affinity between existential
and resultative perfects and thus cast some doubt on the usefulness of
this distinction. In fact, McCawley (1981) concludes that the resultative
perfect is nothing more than the existential perfect plus an implicature
about the present effect of a past event. This is a natural conclusion
for English, but as we will see the distinction between existential and
resultative perfects plays an important role in the use of the two perfect
types in Icelandic.
13 Aspectual classes
Another important factor in the use of the present perfect is the
aspectual class of the main verb. For our purposes it is enough to
distinguish between event verbs and state verbs.3 These two classes
differ e.g. in that only the former can occur in the progressive:
(5) a John is painting the house. (event)
b *John is knowing the answer. (state)
Perfects of event verbs can be either existential or resultative as
shown in (6):
(6) John has painted the house.
Whether (6) is interpreted as an existential or a resultative perfect
depends on the context. On the other hand, (6) cannot be a universal
3 Process verbs are ignored here because they are known to be strange in the non-
progressive perfect:
(i) John has run (since 7.00).
As noted by Mittwoch (1988), run in (i) must be interpreted as an event verb and not
as a process verb. For more discussion on the aspectual classes of verbs see e.g. Dowty
(1979).