The English Perfect is Past

Abstract

This paper argues that the English Perfect is uniformly an embedded Past. This paper shows that differences in meaning between Present Perfect and Past, which are apparently problematic for this theory, are due to the requirement that frame adverbials merge high and directly interact only with the highest tense. Despite attaching high, frame adverbials constrain event time, in the same way modals may constrain temporal interpretation  at a distance (Klecha  2016).