The Role of the Present Perfect in Communication: Analysis of American Movies

This paper focuses on the analysis of the contextualized 502 present perfect expressions from eight American movies with a view to find out the role of the present perfect in communication. The first analysis, the subject use analysis, points out that the present perfect can works in a dual way: it works as a tool of self-disclosure for the speaker and as a tool of understanding speaker's personality makeup for the listener. The second analysis is about what kind of tense follows in the utterance after the present perfect. It turns out that the present perfect is, more often than not, replaced by the present tense, not by the past tense as is often pointed out. In addition, with the statistical result that the speaker and the listener share the present tense almost equally in number, it is possible to conclude that the present perfect has an important role to make a foundation on which both the speaker and the listener can develop a conversation by centering on the present. Consequently, the present perfect has a uniqueness to make it possible for the speaker to lure the listener into the environment of the present-centered communication.