Observations about the form and meaning of the Perfect

The goal of this paper is to establish how certain aspects of the meaning of the perfect are composed from the elements present in its morphosyntactic representation. Not all languages have a present perfect that is structurally and interpretationally distinct from a simple past. We will only be looking at languages that make the distinction. In languages that have a perfect, there is variation with respect to the range of meanings associated with it. There are certain meaning components that are always found with a perfect and there are others that vary depending, as we will show, on several factors.

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