The aspectual makeup of Perfect participles and the. interpretations of the Perfect . tual makeup of the participial VP – both in terms of the Aktionsart of the . | The aspectual makeup of Perfect participles and the interpretations of the Perfect* Roumyana Pancheva 1. The types of perfect Interpretation-wise, several types of perfect expressions have been recog- nized in the literature (., McCawley 1971, Comrie 1976, Binnick 1991, Michaelis 1994, and others). To illustrate, a present perfect can have one of at least three interpretations: (1) a. Since 2000, Alexandra has lived in LA. UNIVERSAL b. Alexandra has been in LA (before). EXPERIENTIAL c. Alexandra has (just) arrived in LA. RESULTATIVE The three types of perfect make different claims about the temporal loca- tion of the underlying eventuality, ., of live in LA in (1a), be in LA in (1b), arrive in LA in (1c), with respect to a reference time. The UNIVERSAL perfect, as in (1a), asserts that the underlying eventuality holds throughout an interval, delimited by the time of utterance and a certain time in the past (in this case, the year 2000). The EXPERIENTIAL perfect, as in (1b), asserts that the underlying eventuality holds at a proper subset of an interval, ex- tending back from the utterance time. The RESULTATIVE perfect makes the same assertion as the Experiential perfect, with the added meaning that the result of the underlying eventuality (be in LA is the result of arrive in LA) holds at the utterance time. The distinction between the Experiential and the Resultative perfects is rather subtle. The two are commonly grouped to- gether as the EXISTENTIAL perfect (McCawley 1971, Mittwoch 1988) and this terminology is adopted here as Two related questions arise: (i) Is the distinction between the three types of perfect grammatically based? (ii) If indeed so, then is it still possible to posit a common representation for the perfect Ð a uniform structure with a single meaning Ð which, in combination with certain other syntactic com- ponents, each with a specialized meaning, results in the three different readings? This paper suggests that the answer to both
