The Interaction between ‘Present Perfect’ Interpretation and Simple Verbs’ Event Type in Persian

Abstract
The present perfect construction (called ‘quotative past tense’ in Persian grammars) receives different interpretations under the influence of such factors as the verb’s lexical meaning, arguments, adverbs, and other contextual linguistic and situational elements. This paper is a semantic survey, focusing on the effects of simple verbs’ eventual meaning on the interpretation of present perfect, and it attempts to investigate the interaction of these two semantic categories, relying on sampled data from corpora. Our results show that statives mostly have resultative and existential interpretations, activities generally have existential interpretation, and achievements and accomplishments have resultative interpretation by default. Other interpretations of each event type are either of a lower frequency (such as universal interpretation for some statives), or they are formed under the influence of contextual factors (such as existential interpretation for some achievements and accomplishments in which the result state has been cancelled by the meaning of the verb or adverbs).
Key words: event type, interpretation, Persian, present perfect, simple verbs.
 
In the studies on event structure, it is primarily the verb that determines the event type, and then, other elements of the structure and discourse are considered as the next layers, respectively. On the other hand, the interpretation of perfect constructions begins with the verb, extending to higher sentential and situational factors afterwards. This paper is intended to investigate the issues of event type and interpretation of present perfect in Persian, both at the verbal level, putting aside the discussion of higher elements and factors of structure and situation. Furthermore, this investigation is restricted to verbs of simple morphological structure, leaving for future research the issue of the contribution of verbal and non-verbal elements of prefixal and complex predicates.
 
The main part of our data was sampled from the corpus of Bijankhan et al. (2011), and occasionally, some data from Google library were included as well (available at https://books.google.com). From the main corpus, 8352 sentences were extracted by searching the label ‘verb-participle’, and 21135 sentences by ‘verb-quotative’. Then, 74 Persian simple verbs were searched in the extracted data, and for each verb, depending on the number of corpus sentences, 10 to 100 sentences of present perfect (2360 sentences, altogether) were sampled, labelling all for interpretation and event type. At data analysis stage, afterwards, a number of verbs and adverbs were searched and labelled from Google library, as required by the analyses (442 sentences for 32 verbs). The event types were determined based on Vendler’s (1957) classification, and interpretations of present perfect were specified according to Comrie’s (1976) list.
Discussion of Results and As far as our data and analyses are concerned, in present perfect constructions, the interpretations mostly found among statives are resultative and existential; activities are generally interpreted as existential, and achievements and accomplishments as resultative by default. A general conclusion from these generalizations is that the resultative interpretation has obtained the largest portion, and the existential interpretation is in the second place. The overwhelming status of the resultative interpretation is along with the general property of perfect constructions, i.e. ‘the continuing relevance to a previous situation’ in the form of establishing the result state at the present time. On the other hand, if the verb’s lexical meaning (in activities and some statives) or another element in the linguistic context or the situation cancels the result state, existential interpretation will be achieved.
However, the lowest portion belongs to the universal interpretation, and at least within our results, no portion is dedicated to the ‘hot news’ interpretation among default interpretations (in the absence of some adverbs, or contextual and situational elements). This conclusion for restricting the main interpretations to resultative, existential and universal, is along with Pancheva’s (2003) approach who considers these three interpretations as the minimum ones for this construction, and assumes that the hot news and recent past interpretations are a variant of resultative or existential.