Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- 1 Subjectivity and subjectivisation: an introduction
- 2 The epistemic weil
- 3 Subjectification in grammaticalisation
- 4 Emphatic and reflexive -self: expectations, viewpoint, and subjectivity
- 5 Subjectification and the development of the English perfect
- 6 Subjectification, syntax, and communication
- 7 Subjective meanings and the history of inversions in English
- 8 Subjectivity and experiential syntax
- 9 Non-anaphoric reflexives in free indirect style: expressing the subjectivity of the non-speaker
- 10 From empathetic deixis to empathetic narrative: stylisation and (de)subjectivisation as processes of language change
- Subject index
- Name index
5 - Subjectification and the development of the English perfect
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- 1 Subjectivity and subjectivisation: an introduction
- 2 The epistemic weil
- 3 Subjectification in grammaticalisation
- 4 Emphatic and reflexive -self: expectations, viewpoint, and subjectivity
- 5 Subjectification and the development of the English perfect
- 6 Subjectification, syntax, and communication
- 7 Subjective meanings and the history of inversions in English
- 8 Subjectivity and experiential syntax
- 9 Non-anaphoric reflexives in free indirect style: expressing the subjectivity of the non-speaker
- 10 From empathetic deixis to empathetic narrative: stylisation and (de)subjectivisation as processes of language change
- Subject index
- Name index
Summary
Introduction
Present perfects are typically characterised as encoding a relation of relevance between a past event and the present moment: some version of the ‘current relevance’ view is adopted in Jespersen (1931), Li, Thompson, and Thompson (1982), Anderson (1982), and Langacker (1991). For example, the utterance John has mowed the lawn (so he can come to the movies) indicates that the past event (the completion of the lawn mowing) is related to John's present ability to go to the movies. Current relevance is an inherently subjective notion in that the link between the past event and the current situation is dependent on the attitude/judgement of the speaker. Harris (1982:54) comments that, in some contexts, ‘only the speaker's subjective judgement determines the presence or otherwise of “present relevance” and hence the choice of the paradigm’. The view that the perfect is imbued with subjectivity is prevalent throughout the literature on tense and aspect (cf. Benveniste 1959, Fleischman 1990).
The purpose of the present chapter is to explore the association of the perfect with subjectivity from a diachronic perspective. Recent crosslinguistic studies such as Dahl (1985) and Bybee et al. (1994) have demonstrated that ‘have’ perfects develop from resultative constructions. Dahl characterises the difference between a resultative and a perfect in the following way:
The term ‘result’ may be understood in a wider or narrower sense … For instance, if a person dies, the result in a narrow sense is that he is dead: the results in a wider sense include e.g. his relatives being sad.[…]
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- Information
- Subjectivity and SubjectivisationLinguistic Perspectives, pp. 83 - 102Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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