The goal of this paper is to establish how certain aspects of the meaning of the perfect are composed from the elements present in its morphosyntactic representation. Not all languages have a present perfect that is structurally and interpreta-tionally distinct from a simple past. We will only be looking at languages that make the distinction.1 In languages that have a perfect, there is varia-tion with respect to the range of meanings associated with it. There are certain meaning components that are always found with a perfect and there are others that vary depending, as we will show, on several factors. 2. Background 2.1. Common characterizations There are a number of intriguing issues surrounding the perfect that have drawn considerable attention in the literature, among the most commonly discussed ones being the fact that the perfect shares properties with both temporal and aspectual forms, and that certain adverbials that one would
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