Although many previous studies have tried to explain the English perfect’s various readings, none of them have been entirely successful. In this article, we argue that the perfect is pragmatically, rather than semantically, ...

The interpretation of the present perfect is often assumed to require pragmatic inferences. However, what rules speakers use to perform these pragmatic inferences is not clear. This paper reports two corpus studies of the ...

This chapter presents preliminary evidence that bears on the issue of how unexpressed (agent) participants are represented and when they are included in the representations of agentless passive sentences using two experimental ...