Expert meeting 5

This presentation will look into the hodiernal reading of the perfect in Catalan and Standard Peninsular Spanish, which places events on the same day as the utterance and can be modified by certain locating time adverbials (e.g., punctual time adverbials). I will consider temporal modification and the main elements that allow for a narrative structure and show that the perfect is not ambiguous between a past and a perfect interpretation: (i) past time adverbials are ruled out; (ii) in a similar way as in French (de Swart 2007), the use of the perfect in narrative passages maintains a deictic nature oriented towards the utterance time. It has been claimed that the Present Perfect Puzzle is directly related to the semantics of the present tense (Klein 1992; Giorgi & Pianesi 1997; Pancheva & von Stechow 2004, a.o.) and I will follow these claims to show that the ability of the present perfect to be modified by certain locating time adverbials (e.g., punctual time adverbials) is linked to the semantics of the present tense, in particular, in the availability of the progressive meaning. The perfect time interval in Catalan as well as in Standard Peninsular Spanish involves a wider time span than the perfect time interval in English. (1) It is able to set a limit on the perfect time interval and locate an event that does not necessarily need to take place within the reference time, (2) the present tense as well as the perfect can appear with adverbials headed by desde ‘since’. Taking into account the semantics of the present tense and a split of the perfect time interval and the reference time (Pancheva & von Stechow 2004, a.o.), I will claim that the main difference that distinguishes the hodiernal reading is due to a possible specification of the event time on a fixed position on the time line.