"Juan has been working for three hours"

[martin.haspelmath@split]

Hi Mark,

in my recent book "From time to space: Temporal adverbials in the
world's languages" (Munich: Lincom Europa, 1997) I studied more than
a dozen types of time adverbials in a world-wide sample of 53
languages, among them the following two:

(1) Posterior-durative, e.g.
     desde 1995, "since 1995"

(2) Distance-posterior, e.g.
     hace tres semanas, "for three weeks"

I focused on the time adverbials, not on the tense-aspect on the
verb, but I did observe that the use of the perfect in this
construction is very rare -- apart from English, I found it only in Swedish, Finnish and
Estonian (so it seems to be a Circum-Baltic areal phenomenon, cf.
1997:77).

As far as the termporal adverbials are concerned, there is enormous
cross-linguistic diversity; both the Spanish and the English patterns
for the Distance-posterior function are very common
cross-linguistically, but quite a few others occur (e.g. German,
where we say _seit drei Wochen_, lit. 'since three weeks').

Hope this helps,
best regards,

Martin Haspelmath             (FU Berlin & Universitaet Bamberg)