What is the Event Elaboration Constraint?
Laura A. Michaelis · 2024
Abstract A paradoxical behaviour of the English resultative present perfect is that while the causal event is unique, its time cannot be specified adverbially, at least in current US English: *We have moved here in 2012. Klein’s influential pragmatic explanation—that the constraint arises from the quantity-based injunction against simultaneously fixing event and reference times—is hard to reconcile with some of the facts: the constraint is neither defeasible nor apparently applicable to past-perfect sentences. I have proposed that the time-specification constraint is one aspect of a broader constraint preventing use of the Resultative Present Perfect (RPrP) to say more about an event that is mutually presupposed to have occurred. In this chapter I extend this constraint to several contexts, only vaguely described in my earlier work, in which verb class, and in particular the directionality of the denoted event, affects usability of the RPrP.