Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2008, Page 60

Ida Larsson
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(10)a. She has been in Gothenburg many times. experiential per-
FECT
b. Since 1995, Lisa has lived in Stockholm. universal perfect
c. She has been sick (lately). perfect of recent past
d. She has just arrived. resultative perfect
The difference between the examples in (10) above relates to how the
event time is located relative the reference time (cf. Iatridou et al.
2001, Kiparsky 2002 and Pancheva 2003); here, the event time must
be understood as a temporal interval and not a point in time.
Experiential perfects like (lOa) place the entire event time anterior to
reference time.8 The universal perfect in (lOb), on the other hand,
asserts that the underlying predicate holds throughout the interval
from 1995 until now, including its endpoints; i.e., ‘Lisa lived in
Stockholm in 1995, she lives there now, and she has lived there dur-
ing the entire interval between 1995 and now’. Hence, the event time
is not completely in the past of the reference time in the universal per-
fect. The perfect of recent past in (lOc) differs from both experiential
and universal perfect in that it is silent about whether the embedded
predicate holds at reference time or not; it will not be discussed fur-
ther here (see Iatridou et al. 2001:161). In the resultative perfect in
(lOd), the transition (the arrival) precedes reference time, but its result
still holds. The resultative perfect requires a telic predicate, i.e. a pred-
icate with an inherent endpoint (see below).
In Icelandic, both the hafa-perfect and the construction with vera
biánn að can express a universal reading; cf. (11) which state that
Frida has been here for a week, and that she still is.
often understood as a subtype of the resultative, with a specifíc use.
1 therefore prefer the pragmatically more neutral term perfect of recent past when
referring to a perfect that is silent about the inclusion of the reference time in the event
time. Other types of perfects (such as the stative present) have also been suggested;
see e.g. Kiparsky (2002) and Pancheva (2003) and references cited there.
8 The experiential reading involves what Zagona (2008) refers to as contained
perfectivity since the event time is completely contained within a larger temporal
interval (the time of which an assertion is made).