Perfect States

Abstract

Perfect predicates have usually been defined as stative. The purpose of this paper is to explain why. I will pay attention to both the resultative and the experiential Perfects. Contrary to Katz (2003), Nishiyama & Koenig (2004, 2010), Michaelis (2011) and Piñón (2014), the stativity of the Perfect will be derived from its nature as a content of grammatical Aspect. More precisely, I will assume that the Perfect allows us to make assertions regarding the state of affairs that follows an event that culminates or ceases (Klein 1992, 1994). In the case that we are dealing with the resultative Perfect, that state of affairs will be equated with the goal state of the subeventive structure of a telic predicate. But if we are dealing with the experiential Perfect, the state of affairs will be equated with the final state of a process which ends up characterizing the subject as a participant in the type of event denoted by the verbal predicate.