Beyond Time - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

esult state including perspective time. This is evidenced in the variation of interpretations
possible with change-of-state verbs, which, as shown in (100), can be interpreted as expressing
a state that holds at perspective time, or of past entry into a state that no longer holds (‘I am
surprised’ vs. ‘I got surprised’, or ‘I am hungry’ vs. ‘I was hungry’, as in (126)). A similar
vagueness is seen with other predicates having a result state, as in (127). These utterances,
unlike the -ite utterances discussed in chapter 6, do not depend on a relevant resultant state.
(126) ndafwa inzala kono tandichifwiile inzala
(127) ndàwà
nda-fw-a inzala kono ta-ndi-chi-fwiile inzala
1sg.cmpl-die-fv cl9.hunger but neg-1sg-pers-die.stat cl9.hunger
‘I was hungry but I am not still hungry’ (ZT2007Elic91)
nda-w-a
1sg.cmpl-fall-fv
‘I fell (and possibly got up again)’ (ZT2007Elic123)
Furthermore, perfect forms in most languages are not used as default forms to refer to
past situations, 11 and appear rarely in narrative clauses (see e.g. Labov & Waletzky 1967:90;
Dahl 1985:138; Fleischman 1990:30). For example, in an English dinnertime conversation if
one participant asks another about the events of the morning, a clear felicity contrast may
be observed between the Simple Past (128a) and the Perfect(128b):
(128) a. I ate breakfast, then I walked the dog.
b. @I have eaten breakfast, then I have walked the dog.
In contrast, -a- is the default marker used to describe past, non-imperfective situations
on the day of perspective time. A relevance analysis would have to account for the lack of a
distinction between relevant events of the day and non-relevant (or less-relevant) situations.
If all events of the day are deemed relevant due to their overlap with the hodiernal domain, the
notion of “relevance” becomes powerless in explaining -a-’s typical temporal interpretations.
Instead, temporal interpretations may be accounted for entirely with the notion of nuclear
completion discussed above. Relevance effects, I argue in 3.2.4, are the result of -a-’s default
location in the associative domain.
While -a- sometimes does describe situations with relevant results (especially with change
of state verbs), in other ways, it is not prototypically perfect in two important ways. The first
11 In other languages, including German and many Romance languages, perfect forms may in some or
most cases be used with near equivalent meaning to simple pasts, although there may be register differences.
Giorgi & Pianesi (1997:87-90) show that in Italian, there are demonstrable differences between Perfects and
Simple Pasts; Bertinetto & Bianchi (2003:575-577) counter that while differences exist, the perfects in Italian
and many other languages are in many cases ambiguous, functioning either as perfects or synonymously with
simple pasts. If synonymous with simple pasts, these expressions are formally, but not semantically, perfect.
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