Ph.D., Associate Professor Lуubov M.Khacheresova

Pyatigorsk State Linguistic University, Russia

ON “READING” OF PERFECT FORMS IN MODERN ENGLISH

The present paper is focused on the semantic functions of verb perfect forms. The analysis is based on the text fragments with the perfect verb forms selected from the British National Corpus of Modern English. The recipient’s ‘reading’ of perfect forms is employed to verify their semantic function. The HAVE-PERFECT and BE-PERFECT correlation is highlighted for further English:: Russian translation studies.

Key words: grammatical perfect, lexical perfective, aspect, opposition, ‘reading’, inference, have-perfect, be-perfect, diachrony.

INTRODUCTION

The objective of the present paper is to differentiate the semantic components of duration, result, fact actualized by perfect and non-perfect verb forms. The semantic analysis is based on the British National Corpus and the conclusions are verified in the framework of the relevance theory [5:41-58]. This research is a step of our series on “The Verb Perfect Aspect”.

DISCUSSION

Robert Dowty researching accomplishment verbs, in other terms wholistic or nonsubinterval calls the situation with the category of aspect ‘imperfective paradox’. The referred verbs used in the progressive form involve different inferences [3:45]. English has not developed any specific morphological tools for resultative derivation [4: 355–392], but uses the semantic feature of result as a basis of numerous oppositions, both grammatical and lexical [13], see: aspect in a verb shows whether the action or state is complete or not. Evidently, the speaker employs various means to express the concept of aspect which overlapping can cause misunderstanding, this situation is proved by numerous nominations of aspect: common and continuous, non-progressive and progressive, perfective and imperfective, non-resultative and resultative, active and passive, etc.

INVESTIGATION

The perfect is concerned with how we are describing the time-frame of an action

or state. In the perfective, we describe a situation as taking place within a single undivided moment. We’re not concerned with how long that moment actually is, we’re just not looking into the composition of it, its internal temporal structure, we are interested in the way of ‘reading’ the entailment by the recipient of the given sentences. e.g.:

1. Young men danced Rose Brady and the girls round the kitchen. A6N 959

If he says that “Young men danced Rose Brady”, he is not telling anything about that process or its relevance to the present just that it happened. It could have taken an hour or it could have taken a year, but he is not telling about what happened within that hour or year. The reader’s implicature will be “He danced Rose Brady”.

Cf.:

2. I have danced the Wellington Boot Dance with the Zulu in the township hostels. FR3400.

Traditionally the present perfect form of the verb ‘is used for actions or events that have been completed or that have happened in a period of time up to now. In this case the perfect is concerned with the relationship between dancing or state being described and another time reference, typically the present. The reader’s implication will be “Now I can dance anybody”. In the perfect, a situation is described relevant to that time frame; see P.Li, and Y.Shirai [8].

In English, the auxiliary “to have” is used for perfect meaning, e.g.:

3. This reads as follows: If a settler who has taken a loan from his settlement and has been charged to tax under the legislation repays the loan the tax previously charged is not of course repaid. J7A821.

We regularly use the present perfect simple with action verbs to emphasize the completion of an event in the recent past. “A settler has taken a loan” implies that that’s relevant to the present. The explicature is “He has already taken a loan and probably does not need it again soon”. The implicature is “He was badly in need of money.”

4. Just look at America's ‘jobless’ recovery, which started two years ago, but has failed to raise employment by much. CRB150.

If the spokesman says that “America has failed to raise employment”, then the level of unemployment is still high”. The reader’s implicature will be “the government tried”. If he says that “America failed to raise employment”, the reader’s implicature will be “There was an attempt at least”.

The lexically imperfective verb can be used in the perfect continuous form to underline a period of time, e.g.:

5. Mr Kingsley Low, General Secretary of the British Beekeepers' Association, said: ‘We have been expecting to find varroa for some time as it is so widespread on the Continent. AJB113.

As a rule we use the present perfect continuous to talk about ongoing events or activities which started at a time in the past and are still continuing up until now. The present perfect form focuses on the action of expecting over a period of time up to now. The time of action is not specified. Even though the activity is finished, we can see the result in the present: However we must not use the continuous form with verbs of mental process: know, like, understand, believe. An imperfective verb can be used in the perfect form relevant to the present [10:148-156]. The reader’s implicature will be: “Now the British Beekeepers' Association members are happy not to have varroa in Britain.”

We can see that there are two separate concepts: grammatical perfect and lexical perfective belonging to two different levels of language structure. However, there’s a conceptual relationship between these two – they verbalize one concept ‘completeness/incompleteness action, cf.:

6. He built roads, schools, hospitals, and sent students abroad for further education, most to France and some to Germany, which many Iranians still saw as their friend simply because it was the traditional enemy of both Britain and Russia. G3R780.

Lexical Perfective (6) underlines the completed action in the past. Whilst in case

of grammatical perfect (7) the completeness of action is relevant to present and the reader’s implicature is “Grimsby bases on it his further way of life”:

7. Grimsby has built a reputation for playing the right way. CEP7262.

When the perfect is being used, the point the speaker is making, is probably about the present rather than the past, e.g:

8. Some biochemists have built up quite elaborate blueprints for forms of life utterly different from our own. CET924.

From both text fragments (7-8) the reader’s implicature will be “thanks to the completed action we employ the results”.

Consequently, we are approaching the grammatical category of aspect [2:3].

Randolph Quirk et al 1985 [11:188] differentiate between non-continuous and continuous forms, e.g.:

9. At the age of 16 he travelled through the Far East and went to Australia to work on a sheep station. A651530.

Aspect is a grammatical category associated with verbs that expresses a temporal view of the event or state expressed by the verb [Quirk, Greenbaum, Svartvik, 1985, p.188] .

The non-continuous form in traditional common form ‘travelled’ does not express the action in duration, I’d rather define it as ‘factive’, cf.:

10. It is 1972 and I am travelling in a minibus through the Bekaa Valley, The Times correspondent in Ireland on holiday in Lebanon, unwittingly choosing to spend my vacation in the country in which I shall much later spend more than 13 years of my life. ANU1433.

The continuous aspect is an imperfective aspect that expresses an ongoing, but not habitual, occurrence of the state or event expressed by the verb [2:12, 26]. In the English grammar system imperfective aspect is an aspect that expresses an event or state, with respect to its internal structure, instead of expressing it as a simple whole. The continuous form underlines duration of action relevant to a certain period of time. The reader’s implicature will be “He is not at work now.”

In the process of the corpus analysis we come across the “be-perfect which we would call “the historical perfect,” e.g.:

10. Then there I was come back from ante-natal and it was blown clean away. AC52910.

11. And then it was over, and they were coming out into the grey, windy day, the mothers trying not to look at the white-capped sea beyond the point, the boys suddenly gruff and silent now that the moment of parting was come. EWH1882.

12. K7G 119. The doughs were come through the machine cut into sizes certain weights moulded and the men put them in tins. K7G119.

13. And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down and worshipped him; and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts: gold and frankincense and myrrh. ALH1908.

14. When I am gone, think of your country. ALX335.

15. She was wearing her rouge and bright red lipstick again, and the childish plaits were gone from her hair. ACW1785.

16. Then in a few minutes they were gone and quiet descended on our yard — but not for long. CDM1045.

In sentences 10-11 the was-come perfect (Past Perfect singular) is registered. In sentences 12-13 the were-tense (Past Perfect plural) is used. In sentences (14) 1-st.person singular of the Present Perfect is used, in (15-16) plural of the Past Perfect is used. Michael Swan considers, that past participles are used like adjectives after the BE-verb to underline that somebody or something has disappeared or there is no more [4:1355–392: 6: 106–118; 7: 19–85]. In sentences 10-16 the BE-verb + Past Participle analytical form denotes the result of the action, not the state. The referred combination goes back to the Old English analytical BE-perfect for the intransitive verbs which functioned alongside with the analytical HAVE-perfect for the transitive verbs. Thomas McFadden and Artemis Alexiadou define both forms as perfect underlining the resultative semantics of the BE-perfect [9:270-278]. The resultative feature of the BE-perfect is dubious especially in cases where the subject of the sentence is the doer of the action and needs its thorough functional semantic analysis in the context longer than the phrase or sentence.

RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES

Nearly all Slavonic verbs exist in two forms which are traditionally defined as “imperfective” and “perfective”. The aspectual relations go beyond simple verbal forms and include the so-called verbids: participles, gerunds and the infinitives. Modern Russian builds its verb aspectual paradigm on the lexical opposition ‘complete::incomplete‘. The Russian language has only three basic tenses. present, past and future. There are two lexical aspects: the imperfective aspect and the perfective aspect in Russian (Maslov,2004), cf.: English builds its verb aspectual paradigm on the grammatical opposition on ‘non-continuous::continuous. Cf.: Ancient Greek, for instance, has an aspectual system distinguishing “Imperfect” (imperfect imperfective), “Aorist” (imperfect perfective), and “Perfect” (perfect perfective), with no room for a perfect imperfective. Contrastive semantics of the perfect aspect in English and Russian will be in the focus of our attention in our next paper.

REFERENCES

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