A Research on the Semantic Mechanism on the English present perfect with a Special Respect to the Synchronic and Diachronic Environment of European Present Perfects.

本报告的中心观点是：1)英语现在完成时是现在时；2)它描述了说话人用HAVE表示的、由分词阐述的预期的现在情景；3)理解HAVE所描述的情景需要对话语和言语行为情景中的语境因素的认识。现在完成时因其带来的难以描述的问题而臭名昭著。这些问题的根源在于未能正确认识时态语素与完成结构本身机制之间的关系。第一个原因是人们普遍认为现在完成时描述的是过去的事件。导致我们产生这种观点的影响之一是，许多欧洲现在完成时都是用来表达过去事件的。另一个原因是，英语时态没有得到足够令人满意的解释，无法解释与现在完成时有关的时态语素的性质。第二个根本原因是缺乏对上下文因素的充分认识，这些因素对现在完成时的使用至关重要。本研究认为，英语现在完成时可以被认为是表达现在的情况，因为(1)英语现在完成时不受中欧发生的从现在到过去的语义变化的影响；(2)附加在构式功能上的时态语素表明句子的内容在说话者确定的现在时间保持不变。其次，本文认为，一旦时态、have、完成分词以及它们之间的相互作用得到了适当的阐明，上述特征就足以说明它的用法。

The central claims of this report are 1) that the English present perfect is in the present tense, 2) that it profiles the speaker's intended present situation denoted by HAVE, elaborated by the participle, and 3) understanding the situation profiled by HAVE requires the recognition of discourse and the contextual factors in the speech act situation.The present perfect is notorious for the difficult descriptive problems it poses. These problems ultimately have arisen from a failure to properly appreciate the relationship between the tense morpheme and the mechanism of the perfect construction itself. The first cause is the accepted picture that the present perfect describes a past event. One of the effects that leads us to this view is the typological fact that many European present perfect forms are known to express past events. The other is that the English tense has not been given an account satisfactory enough to explicate the nature of the tense morpheme attached to the present perfect. The second fundamental cause is the lack of sufficient awareness of the contextual factors crucially involving with use of the present perfect.This research argues that the English present perfect can be considered to express a present situation because(1)the English present perfect has been outside the influence of the semantic change from present to past which occurred in the central Europe and (2)the tense morpheme attached to the construction functions to indicate that the content of the clause holds at the present time identified by the speaker. Second, it argues that once tense, have, the perfect participle and the interaction of these are properly elucidated, the above characterization proves remarkably adequate in accounting for its usage.