Aspectual Grammar and Past Time Reference

This semantic overlap can be evoked as a way of characterizing the close relationship between the past-tense construction and the past-perfect construction: while a past tense assertion like She left is used to describe the past, a present-perfect assertion like She has left is used to assert the existence of an event by invoking its aftermath (herabsence). Dr. Michaelis argues that the two constructions are semantically equivalent, but distinguished by their function in narrative. This study presents a semantic framework for analyzing all aspectual constructions in terms of the event-state distinction, and describes the grammatical expression of aspectual meaning in terms of a theory of grammatical constructions. In this theory, grammatical constructions, like words, are conventionalized form-meaning pairs, which are best described not only with respect to their intrinsic semantic values, but also with respect to the functional opposition in which they participate. Michaelis argues that many of the otherwise puzzling grammatical constraints which characterize the English present-perfect construction can be motivated in terms of the functional opposition between present perfect and past tense.