The English present perfect and simple past tense

As is well known, the English present perfect incorporates temporal anteriority as part of its meaning. However, such conflicting phenomena like the ‘definiteness effect’ and the ‘lifetime effect’ are observed, along with the pastness of the perfect. In this context, a variety of theories utilizing concepts such as ‘indefinite past,’ ‘perfect state,’ and ‘extended now’ have been proposed as major theories on the perfect among others, but not without theoretical defects. Recently, Meyer-Viol and Jones (2011) also propose a formal account of the English present perfect and simple past tense, based on the notions of ‘reference time,’ ‘event time,’ and ‘speech time.’ They account for the definiteness effect and the lifetime effect by analyzing the perfect to have its reference time at the speech time, while the simple past tense to have its reference time at the event time, in line with Reichenbach(1947). Given this, it is proposed in this paper that these previous theories and observations including Meyer-Viol and Jones’s generalizations are met with numerous counterexamples, and that the difference between the English perfect and simple past should be accounted for by classifying the English perfect into the three uses, i.e., Experientials, Resultatives, and Universals. In addition to the semantics of the three uses of the perfect, pragmatic competition between the perfect and simple past is proposed to play a role in deciding which of the two constructions should be chosen, in line with Schaden (2009).