Deriving anteriority in the perfect of recent past
Martijn van der Klis · Linguistics in the Netherlands · 2018
Abstract Most Romance languages share a grammaticalized construction to refer to events in the recent past, e.g. the passé récent in French and the pasado reciente in Spanish. In English, typically a present perfect alongside the adverb just is used to convey this meaning, commonly referred to as perfect of recent past ( Comrie 1985 ) or hot news perfect ( McCawley 1971 ). We show the French passé récent leads to a reading of immediate anteriority, which blocks readings that are available for the passé composé ( Bres & Labeau 2015 ). In a parallel corpus study, we find that the Spanish and French recent past forms have a similar distribution, and the Germanic languages generally use perfect + just in translation. We then provide a DRT analysis to derive immediate anteriority compositionally.