LINGUIST List 10.1269

Tue Aug 31 1999

Sum: Present Perfect/Correction

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. YANAGI Tomohiro, [summary] present perfect (corrected)

I posted a summary for present perfect puzzle a few weeks ago, but I must
correct part of it.

The original question is:

Whether present perfect forms and simple past forms are freely
interchangeable in languages where the adverbs can be used in present
perfects.

To this question, I wrote as follows:

The answer is NO. Simple past and present perfect forms are not generally
interchangeable, but there is some dialectual variation within a language. 
For example, the simple past is preferred to the present perfect in
Northern dialect of Italian while the reverse happens in Southern dialects.

Correction (corrected part is capitalized):

The answer is NO. [...] the simple past is preferred to the present
perfect in SOUTHERN dialects of Italian while the reverse happens in
NORTHERN dialects.

I am grateful to Dieter Vermandere and Salvatore Mele for pointing out this
"slip".

I recieved other responses to the summary posted. Thanks aslo go to
Hendrik, Lloyd Anderson, Hartmut Haberland, and Dr. Joachim Ballweg, who
gave me helpful comments and suggestions.


YANAGI Tomohiro
yanagi_tmbox.media.nagoya-u.ac.jp