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Is there a perfect state?:Experimental evidence from English and Spanish for the perfect-as-state hypothesis
Title / Series / Name
Publication Volume
10
Publication Issue
1
Pages
Editors
Keywords
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/28672
Abstract
The distinction between past and perfect has been subject to theoretical debate for decades. Some of the most prominent accounts argue that the perfect turns the mental representation of a past event into the mental representation of a state, based on a past event: the perfect-as-state hypothesis. This subtle distinction is notoriously difficult to trace, and has only been argued for using linguistic tests. Here, we provide evidence from two psycholinguistic experiments (total N=960), each in English and in Spanish, that operationalize stativity through event individuation. Our results show that compared to the past, the perfect leads to event construals that have more in common with states, both in English and in Spanish. These data constitute the first documentation of different event construals based on tenses that only differ in the subtlest of semantic distinctions.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2025-10-23
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.16995/glossa.18901