THE EXISTENTIAL PERFECT AND ITS MORPHOLOGICAL AND ADVERBIAL REALIZATIONS IN AMERICAN ENGLISH

Abstract The perfect aspect reveals an interval between two points in time. One of its types is the existential perfect (EP), that may be related to a past situation with effects in the present. The goal of this study is to investigate the morphological and adverbial realizations compatible with the EP, associated with the present, in American English (AE). The methodology consisted of analyses of corpora – interviews taken from the American TV and the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English – and of data obtained by a linguistic test. The hypothesis is that the realization of the EP associated with the present in AE only occurs through “have” + past participle, with or without the overt realization of the auxiliary verb. The hypothesis was refuted, since the simple past was also found while realizing this aspect. We discussed the contribution of the verbal forms, adverbs and the plurality of events in the expression of the EP.