Klecha, Peter. 2016. The English Perfect is Past. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 20 .

Keywords. perfect, past, tense, aspect, adverbs, frame adverbials, temporal adverbials

Abstract. This paper argues that the English Perfect is uniformly an embedded Past. This paper shows that differences in meaning between Present Perfect and Past, which are apparently problematic for this theory, are due to the requirement that frame adverbials merge high and directly interact only with the highest tense. Despite attaching high, frame adverbials constrain event time, in the same way modals may constrain temporal interpretation at a distance (Klecha 2016).