Perfect variations in dialogue

Abstract

The variation in distribution and meaning of the English Present Perfect compared to its counterparts in other European languages raises a puzzle for the cross-linguistic semantics and pragmatics of tense and aspect. We apply Translation Mining, a form-based approach, to analyze the meaning of the HAVE-PERFECT across languages in a parallel corpus based on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and its translations in Swedish, Spanish, Dutch, German and French. We use the alternation in the HP novel between narrative discourse (storytelling) and dialogue (the characters talking to each other) to establish the PERFECT as an indexical tense-aspect category that appears exclusively in dialogue. We then link the proposed information management roles of the Present Perfect (Portner 2003; Nishiyama & Koenig 2010) to moves in the language game. We find different distributions of PERFECT use across the sentence types corresponding to these moves (declarative vs. interrogative). This lends support to a cross-linguistically common rhetorical structure in sequences of PERFECT sentences (de Swart 2007).