The aim of the programme is to analyze the meaning of the perfect. This sounds easy, but it is not. Verb forms like English ‘have left’ and their counterparts in other languages combine reference to the past and the present, in ways that have escaped linguistic theory. To get out of the doldrums, we need data that enable cross-linguistic comparison without pre-conceptualized meanings. We obtain those data through a new methodology for multilingual corpus research that we dub ‘Translation Mining’. As the perfect interacts with the grammatical categories past and present, its analysis requires a competition-based approach. Our corpus data show the alternations, so we improve on current analyses by developing a micro-typology that is grounded in translation equivalences between English, Dutch, German, French and Spanish. Perfects vary not only in sentence-level meanings, but also in narrative and non-narrative discourse use. As a theory of temporal structure in non-narrative discourse is lacking, we build a temporal extension of commitment-based dynamic theory to analyze the corpus data of perfects in context. The predictions of a corpus-based analysis need to be checked on an additional corpus and squared with native speakers, so we carry out a corpus experiment and native speaker surveys. The outcome of the programme will be (1) a semantic map of the perfect, (2) a dynamic account of its non-narrative nature, and (3) a unified truth-conditional and dynamic semantics of its sentence-level and discourse-level meanings. The results will be made available for translators, computational linguists and typologists. 

You can meet our team and get acquainted with our research through the following (3 minute) video: https://vimeo.com/222494190. 

Further information is available through the project's website, see: http://time-in-translation.hum.uu.nl

• dr. Bert Le Bruyn
• prof. dr. Henriette de Swart
• dr. Jos Tellings
• dr. Martin Fuchs