[Lingtyp] Intuitions about inclusive time reference

[Östen Dahl]

Many thanks to everyone who has responded to my query!

The background to my question was that I have been worrying about a well-known phenomenon that Astrid De Wit describes as follows in her book "The Present Perfective Paradox across Languages": "the assumption that there is a cognitive constraint on the alignment of bounded situations in their entirety with the time of speaking, and that this constraint is linguistically reflected in the fact that is difficult to use present perfective constructions with dynamic verbs to report present-time events". 

My problem is that while it seems plausible that one cannot place a bounded situation in the present as long as the present, as Aristotle claimed, is not extended in time, the present tense in languages such as English and Russian can be used about non-punctual time intervals, if they include the time of speech, as in "Today the shops are closed" or "Segodnja magaziny zakryty". So you might expect that you should in fact be able to get perfective presents about events that take place with such an interval. But that is rather tricky. It should preferably be a single event, but if you speak of a single event taking place today, you will tend to get a past or future tense depending on whether it is before or after the time of speech, e.g. "Today I got a letter from Mary" or "Today I will write to Mary". So the question is: what happens if I don't know the exact time of the event? I decided to do my best to construct a situation of that kind. 

I think that at this point, I had better not get into further lengthy explanations but just summarize the result of the query (so far). 

Whatever language responses were about, the major tendency was to modify the sentence so as to reflect the source of the information, that is, either state explicitly that this was something Mary had said or just use a form or construction that indicated that this was what had been planned. Some respondents also used plain present-referring constructions. I don't think anyone used a straightforward future tense or anything equivalent, but I may have missed that. - Particularly notable was the use of the past tense in Dutch pointed out by Astrid De Wit and Kees Hengeveld. 

Christian Lehmann points out that a simple present tense would be more likely if I had not mentioned the source of information. My intention was to make the context as clear as possible. However, I think this illustrates a general difficulty with  elicitation as a method. If you mention some aspect of the context in the instructions, this potentially makes it more salient to the respondent than it would be in a natural situation. The respondent may feel a need to include it somehow in the response even if they would not do so "in real life". 

- Östen