ON THE ENGLISH PLUPERFECT: DOES IT REALLY REPRESENT THE PRE-PRETERITE TENSE?

This paper argues against the general view that the English pluperfect represents the pre-preterite tense, drawing on Klein's (1992, 1994) compositional semantic analysis of the English perfect tenses. It is claimed that a nonfinite perfect represents the intrinsic meaning of the perfect tense, and that the perfect is temporal-structurally different from the preterite: the former describes a composite situation which consists of two distinct sub-situations, while the latter describes a single situation. Based on these claims, the temporal schemata of the pre-perfect and the pre-preterite tenses are proposed to account for distributional differences between the pluperfect and the preterite which refer to the past-in-the-past time domain. In order to explain why only the English finite present perfect is incompatible with an adverbial of definite time-position like at four or on March 29, a revised version of Klein's P(osition)-Definiteness Constraint is offered which can cover more data than Klein's original version.