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This paper examines the development of periphrastic constructions involving auxiliary "have" and "be" with a past participle in the history of English, on the basis of parsed electronic corpora. It is argued that the two constructions represented distinct syntactic and semantic structures: while the one with have developed into a true perfect in the course of Middle English, the one with be remained a stative resultative throughout its history. In this way, it is explained why the be construction was rarely or never used in a number of contexts, including past counterfactuals, iteratives, duratives, certain kinds of infinitives and various other utterance types that cannot be characterized as perfects of result. When the construction with have became a true perfect, it was used in such contexts, regardless of the identity of the main verb, leading to the appearance of have with verbs like come which had previously only taken be. Crucially, however, have was not spreading at the expense of be, as the be perfect had never been used in such contexts, but rather at the expense of the old simple past. At least until the end of the Early Modern English period, the shift in the relative frequency of have and be perfects is to be explained in terms of the expansion of the former into new contexts, while the latter remained stable. A formal analysis is proposed, taking as its starting point a comparison with German which shows that the older English be perfect indeed behaves more like the German stative passive than its haben and sein perfects.
Modern theorists rarely agree on how to represent the categories of tense and aspect, making a consistent analysis for phenomena, such as the present perfect, more difficult to attain. It has been argued in previous analyses that the variable behavior of the present perfect between languages licenses independently motivated treatments, particularly of a morphosyntactic or semanticsyntactic nature (Giorgi & Pianesi 1997; Schmitt 2001; Ilari 2001). More specifically, the wellknown readings of the American English (AE) present perfect (resultative, experiential, persistent situation, recent past (Comrie 1976)), are at odds with the readings of the corresponding structure in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), the 'pretérito perfeito composto' (default iterativity and occasional duration (Ilari 1999)). Despite these variations, the present work, assuming a tense-aspect framework at the semantic-pragmatic interface, will provide a unified analysis for the present perfect in AE and BP, which have traditionally been treated as semantically divergent. The present perfect meaning, in conjunction with the aspectual class of the predicate, can account for the major differences between languages, particularly regarding iterativity and the "present perfect puzzle", regarding adverb compatibility.