The simple past versus perfect in English: evidence from Visual World eye tracking

Abstract We present research from Visual World eye tracking to show that, contrary standard assumptions in the formal semantics literature, the English past tense does not reliably trigger entailments of completion on accomplishments in neutral contexts. We contrast it with the perfect construction in English (both present and past tense versions) which does reliably draw attention to the result state; furthermore, we tested the simple past in more narrative contexts (using adverbial clauses to create a narrative sequence) and found that this did not induce a stronger resultative interpretation. We discuss the formal proposals for analysis of these tense/aspect forms in the language, and the consequences this new data has for theories of the tense/aspect system of English.