The Semantics and Pragmatics of the Modern Greek Perfect

Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to provide an account for the meaning and functions of the Modern Greek Present Perfect construction by means of exploring its temporal properties and especially the manner in which they are mapped to the set of available interpretations associated with the Perfect from a cross-linguistic perspective. The Modern Greek Perfect allows a more restricted range of interpretations than the ones typically ascribed to the cross-linguistic category “Perfect” –i.e. the resultative and the experiential. In what follows, I will first give a morphological description of the Perfect construction in Modern Greek and the interpretations it gives rise to. I will then discuss a number of influential and competing analyses for the semantics of the Present Perfect, namely, a temporal, Extended Now, approach (Iatridou et al. 2003; Portner 2003, 2011; Giannakidou 2003), a Discourse Representation Theory-based analysis (Kamp & Reyle 1993; de Swart 1998, 2003) and a synthesis of the two types of analyses (Nishiyama 2006; Nishiyama & Koenig 2010), which adequately captures the Modern Greek data, by means of a semantic and a –discourse-oriented –pragmatic component, which makes use of principles of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (Lascarides & Asher 1993, 2008), upon assigning perfect sentences their interpretation. The analysis of the Modern Greek Perfect offered in the course of this paper rests on the assumptions put forth in these studies, which were tested through a corpus-based study, and were modified accordingly, so as to accommodate the Modern Greek data.