The present perfect in present-day Swedish - with a comparison to Japanese

Abstract

In my dissertation, I examine how the present perfect tense – e.g. har gjort ‘have done’ and har sett ‘have seen’ – is used in contemporary Swedish, and I also compare the Swedish present perfect to tense–aspect forms in Japanese.

The overall aim of the dissertation is to attain a better understanding of the functions of the present perfect in the Swedish tense–aspect system and how we can account for the various meanings expressed with the Swedish present perfect. In the literature, it is common to compare the Swedish present perfect to individual tenses – especially the preterite (cf. SAG 4) – but I argue that the present perfect needs to be understood in relation to the entire Swedish tense–aspect system.

The dissertation contains two empirical studies: a corpus study on the meaning variation of the Swedish present perfect, and a contrastive corpus study in which I compare the Swedish present perfect to tense–aspect forms in Japanese. Japanese has no grammatical category that structurally corresponds to the Swedish present perfect, but several Japanese tense–aspect forms are used similarly. By comparing the Swedish present perfect with Japanese, we can more clearly distinguish what semantic distinctions are made in Japanese and how these distinctions are realized in Swedish. This allows us to gain a different understanding of the Swedish present perfect than we would if we compared it with another language that also has a grammatical category labeled present perfect, for instance English.

The results of the thesis show that the Swedish present perfect has four main uses, and I propose a different classification than previously suggested in the literature (cf. Rothstein 2008 and Larsson 2009). Furthermore, the results show that it is primarily the past form -ta and the durative non-past form -teiru in Japanese that are used similarly to the Swedish present perfect. 

The findings suggest that Swedish tenses generally relate events to the moment of speech, whereas Japanese tense–aspect forms often relate events to the time of other events. One conspicous trait of the Swedish present perfect appears to be that it primarily indicates temporal relations in relation to the moment of speech rather than between different events. Based on these results, I discuss alternative perspectives to the common view found in the literature that the present perfect pertains to “a past event with current relevance” (cf. SAG 4).