This thesis is a sociolinguistic study of Preterit and Present Perfect (PP) usage in contemporary and earlier Argentinian River Plate Spanish (ARPS). The data analyzed stem from a 244,034-word corpus collected for the purposes of the study, including contemporary casual conversation, sociolinguistic interviews, participant observation, written questionnaires, and newspapers spanning the 19th–21st centuries. / The study is motivated by previous claims that in Latin America the PP is restricted to contexts that extend into the present time, resembling Peninsular medieval and Renaissance usage (e.g. Lope Blanch 1972: 138; Harris 1982: 50; Squartini & Bertinetto 2000: 413). I challenge this proposal showing that (1) ARPS has undergone its own development, and (2) Latin American varieties do not represent earlier frozen developmental stages akin to earlier Peninsular Spanish. / Although low in overall frequency, the contemporary ARPS PP is used in experiential settings to express indefinite past (a vernacular use). Moreover, multivariate analysis of the contemporary oral data reveals that the ARPS PP is not aspectually restricted to repetitive and iterative contexts extending into speech time – contrary to Schwenter and Torres Cacoullos’ (2008) findings for contemporary oral Mexican Spanish. Indeed, the data show that the ARPS continuative PP is losing its link-to-present requirement. The ARPS PP also features minimally in resultative and continuative settings, supporting layering of old and new grammaticalizing structures (Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca 1994: 21). Present relevance does not determine ARPS PP usage and is instead encoded through the Preterit and temporal adverbials (TAs). / Historically, the PP has dwindled in usage frequency since the 19th century and the Preterit has invaded the spaces erstwhile occupied by the PP. PP functions like result, continuity, current relevance, and hot news are currently fulfilled by the Preterit, in combination with TAs (TA + VERB-PRET). I argue that the TA + VERB-PRET construction has emerged as a periphrastic encoder of PP nuances, a development reminiscent of perfect periphrases in languages such as Yoruba and Karaboro (Niger-Congo) (Dahl 1985: 130). A contemporary example of this construction includes the widespread temporal marker ahí ‘at this point in time’ (lit. ‘there’) in combination with the Preterit to indicate temporal immediacy. / The contemporary ARPS PP is sociolinguistically constrained; men use it significantly more often than women. The PP is also employed by younger speakers, challenging the position that this form is on the verge of extinction (Kubarth 1992a: 565; Burgos 2004: 103). In contrast to the contention that the PP occurs more frequently in written media (e.g. De Kock 1989: 489; Squartini & Bertinetto 2000: 413), the contemporary oral and newspaper corpora show similar distributional tendencies. Only in the questionnaire is the PP used more readily in ways unattested in oral interaction (i.e. in current relevance and past perfective settings). ARPS ambivalent use of the PP represents the essence of the so-called “actuation problem”; that is, the contention that the process of linguistic change involves stimuli and constraints from both society and from the structure of language (Weinrech, Labov & Herzog 1968: 186).

FONSECA, Maria Cristina Micelli. A semântica e a pragmática na compreensão das oposições present perfect X past simple do inglês e pretérito perfecto X pretérito indefinido do espanhol. 2006. 229f. Tese (Doutorado) - Universidade de São Paulo, Departamento de Linguística, São Paulo, 2006. / Submitted by anizia almeida (aniziaalmeida80@gmail.com) on 2016-09-09T11:22:10Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2006_tese_mcmfonseca.pdf: 2203074 bytes, checksum: 6e6d060283ef30feaa9761f29f478e51 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Márcia Araújo (marcia_m_bezerra@yahoo.com.br) on 2016-09-13T14:39:48Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 2006_tese_mcmfonseca.pdf: 2203074 bytes, checksum: 6e6d060283ef30feaa9761f29f478e51 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-09-13T14:39:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2006_tese_mcmfonseca.pdf: 2203074 bytes, checksum: 6e6d060283ef30feaa9761f29f478e51 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006 / In this thesis, the roles of Semantics and Pragmatics in text comprehension tasks have been investigated in Portuguese speakers interlanguage early grammar. The texts in both English and Spanish had past events told employing Present Perfect x Past Simple and Pretérito Perfecto x Pretérito Indefinido pairings. We have adopted (Michaellis, 1998) that the English periphrasis has as its most salient meaning the resultative reading and have applied it to the Spanish periphrasis as well. Portuguese, on the other hand, expresses resultative meaning in different ways most of the times leading students to see in the Present Perfect and Pretérito Perfecto structures the past event meaning alone. Consequently, when analyzing the foreign language structures, learners end up assigning them the aspectual values which belong to the Portuguese [TER+Participle] and [ESTAR+Gerund] periphrases, despite their not sharing the same aspectual values most of the time, because the English and Spanish forms express the perfective and resultative aspect, while the Portuguese periphrasis indicates the imperfective and durative aspect. This mismatch affects text comprehension, but is not perceived by the students. Learners first analyze the target language structure (topdown procedure, Liceras, 2003a), once they cannot have access to the features which trigger the parameter setting, precluding a bottom-up procedure. The same pattern of value assignment from the L1 periphrasis to both L2 is noticeable in both English and Spanish interlanguages. Analysis of Variance tests have proven that both interlanguages undergo the same process, which starts from L1 reestructuring. This fact suggests that adult L2 learner will make use of UG principles, but will not set parameters the way children do, L2 will grow by reestructuring portions of L1. The semantic values applied in both English and Spanish interlanguages at this stage, are L1?s as well, allowing a comparison to the phonology acquisition. Children are born sensitive to any semantic value, but due to a critical period for semantics, adult L2 learners will acquire L2 semantic values by reestructing not only the syntax of L1 but also its semantic values. Learners will have access to pragmatics, after semantics, as a fine-tuned meaning. / Nesta tese observa-se o papel que a semântica e a pragmática desempenham, na gramática inicial (early grammar) da interlingua de falantes de português, na compreensão de textos em inglês e em espanhol nos quais se relatam eventos passados e se empregam as oposições Present Perfect x Past Simple e Pretérito Perfecto x Pretérito Indefinido. Assumimos (Michaellis, 1998) que um dos valores mais fortes das formas compostas dessas duas línguas é o resultativo e que como o português, na maioria das vezes, expressa o resultado de outros modos, o aprendiz vê naquelas apenas uma maneira de expressar ações passadas. Em função disso, ao analisar a estrutura na língua estrangeira, acaba atribuindo aos tempos compostos de ambas os valores aspectuais das perífrases (TER+Particípio) e (ESTAR+Gerúndio) do português, que em muitos casos não coincide com os valores das formas perifrásticas das línguas que estão aprendendo. Enquanto as perífrases da língua estrangeira têm o aspecto perfectivo resultativo, as do português tem valor imperfectivo continuativo. Tal fato, que afeta a compreensão do texto, não é percebido pelos aprendizes. Estes analisam primeiramente a sintaxe da língua-alvo (top-drow procedure, Liceras, 2003a) uma vez que não tem acesso aos traços que desencadeiam a fixação de parâmetros para a realização do bottom-up. O padrão de atribuição dos valores das perífrases da L1 para a L2 aparece nas interlínguas do espanhol e do inglês, apontando para um mesmo processo, independente de a língua-alvo ser mais ou menos próxima do português. Testes com análise de variância comprovam que se trata de um mesmo processo para as duas línguas, que começa a partir da reestruturação da L1, sugerindo que a aquisição dessa é regida pelos princípios da GU, mas que a marcação de parâmetros não acontecerá como na L1, mas se dará via reestruturação de porções da L1. os valores semânticos utilizados na interlíngua, com a fonologia, a criança nasce com sensibilidade para acessar qualquer valor semântico, mas existe um período crítico que faz com que a aquisição da L2 ocorra por reestruturação não apenas sintática mas também semântica dos valores da L1. A pragmática, por sua vez, será acessada, após a semântica, como uma sintonia fina do sentido.

The Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, 1994; 1996) proposes that the inherent lexical aspect of verbs plays a major role in the acquisition of tense-aspect (TA) morphology in both first and second language. This has been attested in most studies on TA morphology conducted with past and present TA markers. The present study examined the acquisition of Present Perfect, a rather insufficiently studied TA form from a Prototype Account, in two of its four functions, Experiential Past and Persistent Situation. The subjects were 85 L1-Spanish English language learners at intermediate and advanced levels. All participants had received formal instruction in English grammar as part of their curriculum. The data was collected through a forced-choice task with 16 situations equally distributed between the two Present Perfect functions and between telic and atelic verbs of four semantic categories: stative, activities, achievements, and accomplishments. Participants had to choose the correct verb form out of three options (Present, Past or Present Perfect) that would best complete the sentences given. The results showed evidence of clear developmental stages in the acquisition of the Present Perfect. The stages were characterized by an important role of proficiency level and lexical aspect as the more proficient participants showed a more accurate use of the target form. In addition, both the intermediate and advanced groups showed a tendency towards employing Persistent Situation with atelic verb types, whereas they used Experiential Past with telic verbs. Contrary to the predictions of the AH, the use that seemed to be first acquired and easier to learn was Persistent Situation, which obtained higher correctness rates in both groups than Experiential Past. When the results were analyzed across each aspectual verb type, the pattern of acquisition was less clear and thereby partly met the claims of the AH. This irregular trend attested in the data encouraged the argument that the acquisition of the functions of the Present Perfect may not be solely influenced by lexical aspect and verb prototypicality but several other factors may be at stake, such as sentence-type effect, input distribution, L1 transfer and rote-learned forms. Therefore, developmental stages in the acquisition of the Present Perfect should be examined in view of an interplay of "multiple factors" as already proposed by Sugaya and Shirai (2007), which work simultaneously and in a complementary fashion in the acquisitional process of TA morphology.

Orientador : Linda Gentry El-Dash / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-04T01:07:45Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Elizi_CesarEduardoDuarte_M.pdf: 195109 bytes, checksum: 20ae879bedc5d26fdf03f2805bcd97c7 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2004 / Resumo: Essa dissertação visa avaliar a utilização de atividades de Foco na Forma na aquisição, por alunos brasileiros, do tempo verbal Present Perfect através de uma comparação com a Abordagem Comunicativa tradicional. Tal abordagem apresenta, apesar de diversas vantagens, uma limitação na competência gramatical final atingida por alunos de línguas estrangeiras. Uma possível causa dessa limitação, além de outras, é a insuficiência do insumo em fornecer ao aprendiz evidência negativa, i.e. informação sobre a agramaticalidade de frases para as quais L2 é um subconjunto de L1. O que vem sendo chamado de Foco na Forma (FonF, do inglês Focus on Form) funciona como uma intervenção em que se direciona a atenção do aprendiz para aspectos de L2 em meio a uma atividade que privilegia a troca de significados. Desta forma, ao contrário do que ocorre com o Foco nas FormaS (seguindo a nomenclatura de Michael Long ), o FonF não interrompe o ato comunicativo para o estudo e prática de itens gramaticais de maneira isolada, mas busca produzir um desvio temporário de atenção, por parte do aprendiz, enquanto este está empenhado em realizar uma tarefa de compreensão ou produção. Descrevemos o Present Perfect como uma estrutura de difícil análise por parte do aluno brasileiro. Isto se deve, em parte, à má qualidade da maioria dos materiais didáticos disponíveis em relação a essa estrutura. O experimento realizado comparou dez salas de aula de quinto estágio de inglês com relação ao desempenho em pré e pós testes que avaliavam a habilidade dos alunos em (a) reconhecer a forma verbal correta para frases em meio a distratores, (b) identificar frases contendo a estrutura alvo como gramaticais ou não e (c) reproduzir por escrito um texto lido pelo professor contendo quatro ocorrências da estrutura alvo. Entre os dois testes utilizou-se três tipos de tratamento : (1) baseado em compreensão de textos; (2) baseado na reprodução escrita de textos e (3) sem Foco na Forma. Os resultados obtidos se mostram favoráveis ao uso de FonF para o Present Perfect e sugerem que atividades de compreensão de texto são mais benéficas que as de reprodução. Uma pergunta de conscientização ( o que você aprendeu?) feita à parte dos grupos dos tratamentos (1) e (2) resultou em uma melhoria de desempenho ainda maior para o grupo de compreensão de textos. Isto nos leva à hipótese de que convidar o aluno a refletir sobre sua aprendizagem auxilia na percepção de elementos novos, possivelmente por ativar processos cognitivos apenas disponíveis (sobretudo no tocante à filtragem de estímulos presentes no insumo) quando o objeto de estudo desperta no aluno um elemento de relevância pessoal / Abstract: The objective of this dissertation is to evaluate the use of Focus on Form in the acquisition of the verb tense Present Perfect by Brazilian students through a comparison with the traditional Communicative approach. This approach presents, despite several advantages, a limitation in the final grammatical competence attained by students. A possible reason for such limitation, among others, is the insufficiency of input alone in providing negative evidence, i.e. information about the agrammaticality of phrases for which L2 is a subset of L1. What has been labeled as Focus on Form, or FonF for short, is an intervention in which we direct students¿ attention to aspects of L2 during an activity aimed at the exchange of meaning. In this way, unlike what happens with Focus on FormS ( following Michael Long¿s terminology), FonF does not interrupt a communicative act in exchange for the isolated study and practice of grammar structures, but tries to divert students¿ attention momentarily, while they are engaged in a meaningful comprehension or production task. The Present Perfect is a structure which presents several difficulties to the Brazilian learner. This is partly due to the misleading explanations presented by most textbooks available. The experiment compared ten groups at level 5 in terms of their performance in pre and post tests. These tests evaluated the students¿ ability to (a) select the correct verb forms for incomplete sentences among distractors; (b) classify sentences containing the target-structure as either grammatically correct or not and (c) reconstruct in writing a text read aloud by the teacher which contained four instances of the target structure. Three different treatments were used : (1) with FonF tasks based on reading comprehension; (2) with FonF tasks based on text reconstruction and (3) without FonF. The results are in favour of the use of FonF activities for the Present Perfect and suggest that reading comprehension tasks are more beneficial than the text reconstruction ones. An awareness-raising question (what did you learn?) which was asked to some of the groups (1) and (2) resulted in an even better performance by the groups working with reading comprehension tasks. This has led to the hypothesis that asking the students to reflect upon their learning facilitates the noticing of new elements, possibly by activating cognitive processes only available ( particularly in what concerns the filtering of stimuli present in the input) when the object of study triggers an element of personal relevance in the student / Mestrado / Mestre em Linguística Aplicada

The aim of this study is to examine the teachers’ attitudes towards teaching the Spanish verb tense pretérito indefinido which corresponds to the preterite tense in English. In the Swedish Compulsory School teachers generally avoid introducing this verb tense in the second level even though this form is more frequent in oral and written Spanish than the present perfect tense. According to previous studies and teachers’ own experience, after four years of studying Spanish the students barely have any understanding of the preterite tense. Therefore, we wanted to find out the teachers’ attitudes towards introducing this verb tense earlier than is the case in today’s school system. The study was carried out with fifty informants who answered a questionnaire divided into two parts, where the first is related to general questions such as age, native language, and experience of teaching. In the second part of the study, the informants rated their agreement or disagreement to 12 statements on a Likert scale. The results of the analysis indicate that the majority of the informants has a positive attitude towards introducing the preterite tense earlier, although some of the informants prefer to teach the present perfect for different reasons. The study also showed that language background and regional variations have an impact on their attitudes.

Most Brazilian students learning English face difficulty when studying thepresent perfect. It is one of the most challenging aspects of the Englishlanguage for Portuguese speakers due to the similar form with a divergentsemantic value. The Brazilian Portuguese present perfect forces iteration andthe student automatically transfers the same meaning when translating anEnglish sentence literally. Brazilian learners get confused about when and inwhat situations to use the English present perfect and frequently are not able todistinguish it from the simple past use. This study is comprised of two parts.First, a comparative study was done to investigate which Portuguese tensetranslators of famous literary books consider to be equivalent to the Englishpresent perfect according to the message which is being conveyed. Thedatabase used was the bidirectional parallel corpus of English and PortugueseCOMPARA. Second, textbooks developed to teach English in Brazil wereanalyzed in order to verify from what perspective students were beinginstructed concerning the present perfect and whether the semantic differencesbetween the two languages were pointed out. According to the translationcorpus, the English present perfect is mostly equivalent to Brazilian Portuguesesimple past. Adverbs are also often needed to express the English presentperfect meaning in Portuguese. The textbooks were found to present poorexplanations and seem not to call the learners’ attention to the source of the problems. Textbooks do not stress the importance of the semantic value and thecontext, and do not call attention to the different meanings between theBrazilian and the English present perfect.

Comparison of the Tense Systems in Spanish and French: the Use of the Present Perfect and Past Simple This paper is concerned with tenses in Spanish and in French. First they are analysed generally, from the theoretical point of view, and subsequently, the author focuses on comparing the use of two of them: the present perfect and the past simple. The author is building on the conviction that although the verb systems of Roman languages are nearly identical, and also that the basic values of their tenses are identical, their specific uses may differ. First, she examines how tenses participate in the expression of time in language and how they can refer to extralinguistic time. As much attention has been paid to this topic, part one of the paper examines the theories that have been reflected the most in works on Spanish and French verbs. The fact that each of them emphasises a different aspect in explaining the meaning and function of each tense allows us to better understand the fundamental value of the tenses. One chapter is devoted to the diachronic view of the Roman system of verbs which allows us to see which features and development tendencies are common to all Roman languages, and which are only found in some of them. Here, the author points out primarily the fact that the loss of the...

The aim of the present work is to describe the semantics and the discursive functions from a general cognitivist point of view of the usage of the Present Perfect in the spoken Spanish of Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. It is argued that cross-linguistic values often ascribed to perfect, such as continuity, current relevance and recency to the speech time –ST– do not offer a consistent view of the actual usage. It is assumed that a basic meaning of the perfect operates in the studied dialects and is retrievable in all tokens, which differs significantly from the current descriptions of the perfect of “general” Spanish. The results show that the ST might very well be an inference of the basic meaning of the Perfect but it is not an intrinsic component of the Perfect’s semantics. Based mainly on Dahl & Hedin (2000), as well as on Langacker (1987), the revitalizing of the concepts type and token reference are suggested as key principles for identifying the respective domains of the Spanish Present Perfect and the Simple Past in the studied area. The Perfect, through type reference, makes an assertion of a situation as a representation of the class-type of the verbal semantics. The Simple Past, however, through token reference conceptualizes the situation as having explicit or implicit anchoring in the chronological axis of time. Three main kinds of contexts occur typically with the Perfect in the samples: detemporalized ascertainment, summary (in a broad sense of the word) and aspectual complexity. Summary scanning (Langacker, 1987), i.e. the schematic and holistic detemporalized conceptualization of the development of a given situation, is claimed to be used by informants for discursive purposes, granting a greater rhetorical weight to the Perfect. The results founded in this thesis indicate that the perfect tenses in Spanish have followed (and are following) different developmental paths that are not necessarily restricted to the same sequences and mode of grammaticalization.

Συγκριτική συντακτική ανάλυση του Παρακειμένου της Νέας Ελληνικής και των κυριοτέρων ρωμανικών και γερμανικών γλωσσών. / The present thesis is an analysis concerning the periphrases of the present perfect in Modern Greek, and in the main Romance and Germanic languages, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, English, German and Dutch. It consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, I present the data concerning the formation and the uses of the present perfect in the aforementioned languages. I particularly insist on the fact that in some languages there is auxiliary selection. French, Italian, German and Dutch, on one hand, generally select the auxiliary verb “have” to form the periphrases of the present perfect of transitive verbs, whereas, they select the verb “be” to form the present perfect of unaccusative verbs. Moreover, two of these languages, French and Italian have participle agreement. The participle used in the formations of these periphrases agrees in gender and number with the subject of the phrase if the auxiliary verb “be” is used, whereas, it agrees with the object if the verb “have” is used, but only on condition that the object precedes the participle. This can occur mainly when the object is a pronoun. In the second chapter, I proceed to the syntactic analysis of the data. I look into Kayne’s (1993) analysis on auxiliary selection. Kayne, following Freeze (1992), supports that the syntactic analysis of the possessive “have” should be adopted for the auxiliary “have” as well. He believes that the only difference between the two constructions is the fact that the complement of the auxiliary “have” should be one appropriate for a participle. Moreover, Kayne (1993) supports that the two auxiliary verbs “have” and “be” are basically the same. “Have” is “be” with a locative. In this chapter I also present some additional, more recent views concerning the constructions of the periphrases of the present perfect, the ones of Iatridou (2007) and D’Alessandro (2010). In the third chapter, I look into participle agreement. I suggest that this kind of agreement is related to, and depends on the position of adjectives in each language. In languages like French and Italian the adjective is usually put after the substantive. As a result, participles only agree with the argument they characterize/determine, depending on the construction, if they are in a structural position which is compatible with the position of the adjective. In languages like German and Dutch, adjectives always precede substantives. However, participles never do so when they are part of a periphrasis of the present perfect. German and Dutch never show participle agreement. In Greek, on the other hand, the adjective can either precede or follow the verb. This seems to be the reason why participles in Greek always show agreement. Finally, in English, adjectives and consequently participles never show any kind of agreement due to the fact that they lack clitic morphology. Following Wasow (1977) and his analysis on verbal and adjectival participles, but also Kibort (2005), I support that past participles that show agreement constitute an intermediate participial category between the verbal and the adjectival ones. They seem to be “resultative” participles which act as verbs but bear adjectival features. I propose that it is possible that the function of these participles in the periphrases of the present perfect is either to produce or to reinforce the perfect of result. I conclude that Modern Greek is the only language, among the ones examined, that has unconditional participial agreement, and can produce two different kinds of the present perfect with most verbs, the perfect of experience, on one hand, and the perfect of result, on the other.

Les travaux précédents menés en acquisition du langage soutiennent que les premières formes verbales de l’enfant sont limitées à l’expression de l’ici et maintenant (Weist, 1991). Cependant, une étude sur le développement du système verbal temporel en français (Parisse & Morgenstern, 2012) montre que l’enfant dispose d’une capacité à faire référence au passé de manière précoce, avant la production de marqueurs spécifiques dédiés à cet effet. Les études sur l’acquisition de l’aspect établissent une forte corrélation entre la production des verbes téliques et l’aspect perfectif (Shirai & Andersen, 1995), sans toutefois distinguer les marqueurs prétérit et present perfect. Slobin (1994) montre que le present perfect présente des fonctions communicatives spécifiques en lien avec l’expression du résultat et de l’expérience. À notre connaissance, aucune étude développementale de l’acquisition de ce marqueur n’a été menée jusqu’à présent. Nous nous proposons d’étudier les productions précoces de present perfect chez deux enfants britanniques dans le cadre des premiers usages des marqueurs de l’ici et maintenant et du décentrement dans le passé et de leurs valeurs dans le langage adressé à l’enfant. Nous avons mené des analyses quantitatives et qualitatives sur deux corpus longitudinaux denses d’interactions orales spontanées adulte/enfant (Tomasello, 2003). Nos résultats suggèrent que les productions précoces de present perfect résultent de la fréquence du marqueur trouvée chez l’adulte et du développement cognitif de l’enfant. L’étude des premiers usages du marqueur révèle que l’enfant s’appuie d’abord sur un état résultant visible à T0. Progressivement, l’enfant se sert de l’état résultant attaché à la production du marqueur pour verbaliser des attentes ou des intentions présupposées à T0. L’enfant demande ainsi à l’adulte de répondre à des besoins spécifiques exprimés dans la situation présente. / Previous studies in language acquisition have claimed that the verbal forms in early child language are limited to the expression of the here and now (Weist, 1991). However, a study of the verbal temporal system in French children’s speech (Parisse & Morgenstern, 2012) has shown that the children are able to refer to past events from an early age before they produce specific grammatical markers. Studies on the acquisition of aspect have established a strong correlation between the production of telic verbs and perfective aspect, without distinguishing between the present perfect and past tense. Slobin (1994) has shown that the first uses of the present perfect serve specific communicative functions that relate to the expression of result and experience. To our knowledge, no developmental study of the acquisition of the present perfect has been conducted so far. We conducted a study of how two British children use the present perfect in connection with their first uses of the markers referring to the here and now and their early productions of past tense. We examined the early uses of the markers in relation to the uses identified in the child directed speech in two dense oral corpora. Analyses based on qualitative and quantitative data were conducted on the adult and the child’s speech in the context of the interactions between the two (Tomasello, 2003). Our results suggest that the early productions of the present perfect result from the frequency of the marker found in the input and the cognitive development of the children. The study shows that they first rely on a visible resultant state in T0. Gradually, the children come to use the resultant state attached to the production of the marker to verbalise presupposed expectations or intentions in T0. By doing so, the children ask their caregivers to address specific needs that are expressed in the current situation.