The English Perfect and the Metaphysics of Events

Abstract

I argue here that the what Otto Jespersen called the “conservative” English Perfect is a purely aspectual predicate, true of occurrent results of prior events, noting also: (i) that nominalizations, including nominalizations of the Perfect, call for extending event positions to nonheads including adverbs and quantifiers, and (ii) that restrictions on the present perfect with prior temporal determinations extend also to embedded clauses under the principles governing tense anaphora, or sequence of tense.