Summary Details

Query:	[summary] present perfect (corrected)
Author:	YANAGI Tomohiro
Submitter Email:	click here to access email
Linguistic LingField(s):	Syntax
Summary:	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_t@mbox.media.nagoya-u.ac.jp

LL Issue:	10.1269
Date Posted:	31-Aug-1999
Original Query:	Read original query
Back

Sums main page

New from Cambridge University Press!