Crosslinguistic differences on the Present Perfect Puzzle: An experimental approach Martín Fuchs & Martijn van der Klis* Abstract. In this paper, we analyze how different temporal and referential properties of past-referring adverbials –specifically, hodiernality and deixis– are partially respon- sible for the crosslinguistic distribution of PAST and PERFECT markers across Dutch, Spanish, and English. To that end, we conducted an acceptability judgment task, where 160 subjects per language rated context-sentence pairs that display either a PAST or a PERFECT marker, and a temporal adverbial that is: (i) either temporally close to or tem- porally far from the speech time, and (ii), either deictic or not deictic. Results show that: (a) Dutch allows for its PERFECT marker to combine with any past-referring tem- poral adverbial, (b) Spanish only allows its PERFECT marker to combine with adverbials that locate the event temporally close to speech time, regardless of deixis, and (iii) that English prefers its PAST marker in all past-referring situations, but allows its PERFECT to combine with adverbials that are both deictic and temporally close to speech time, particularly when the adverb specifies an interval that is included in the day of utter- ance (e.g., this morning), as opposed to adverbs that describe an interval that includes it (e.g., this month). Keywords. Perfect; Past; grammatical aspect; temporal adverbials; deixis; hodiernal- ity; acceptability judgments 1. Introduction. The distribution of the Present Perfect1and the Simple Past in English is said to encompass a distinction between past events that have some current relevance or might continue into the present –which are expressed using the Present Perfect–, and past events that started and ended before utterance time –expressed with the Simple Past. This contrast is especially observable when the events at issue are anchored to a definite or specific time in the past. Since Klein (1992), it is well known that the Present Perfect marker cannot combine with a temporal adverbial refer- ring to the past, so that the Simple Past has to be used instead, as in (1): (1) Chris *has left / left today at three o’clock. (adapted from Klein 1992: 546, (ex.45)) In the sentence in (1), the specification of the past time reference (‘today at three o’clock’) makes the use of the Present Perfect form has left impossible, so that the only available option is the Simple Past form left. This incompatibility has been referred to in the literature as the Present Perfect Puzzle, since both the Present Perfect and the Simple Past are able to locate an event in * We would like to thank the organizers of ELM 2 –for developing such a great venue for the exchange of ideas on linguistic meaning and experimentation– and its audience, for helpful feedback and comments. We would also like to thank the audiences at LSRL 52 and CLS 58 for valuable suggestions about the research presented here. The Time in Translation (TinT) team at Utrecht University has been fundamental in the pursuit of this project, too, and we thank all of its members for their critical engagement with our work. Finally, we thank our funding agency, NWO grant 360- 80-070, without whose support the work reported here would not have been possible. All errors and omissions remain our own. Authors: Martín Fuchs, Utrecht Institute of Linguistics, Utrecht University (m.fuchs@uu.nl) & Martijn van der Klis, Utrecht Institute of Linguistics, Utrecht University (m.h.vanderklis@uu.nl). 1 We use italics to indicate language-specific forms, and small caps for crosslinguistic marker types comprising a set of language-specific forms (e.g., Present Perfect in English, Passé Composé in French, and Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto in Spanish, among others, correspond to the PERFECT crosslinguistically). We reserve plain text with initial capitalization to refer to meanings. Proceedings of ELM 2: 61-71, 2023 c©2023 Martı́n Fuchs and Martijn van der Klis Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY license. 61 https://doi.org/10.3765/elm https://www.elm-conference.net/ the past, making it somewhat surprising that one of these markers –the Present Perfect– is ulti- mately incompatible with past-referring adverbials. Most solutions for this pattern invoke a Reichenbachian framework (Reichenbach 1947), where an additional time point –the Reference Time– is considered. According to Reichenbach (1947), both the Simple Past and the Present Perfect situate the time of the event (E) before the time of speech (S), but the difference between these tense markers resides in the position of refer- ence time (R). In the case of the Simple Past, the reference time (R) coincides with the event time (E), producing a E,R < S configuration, where < indicates precedence in time. Conversely, the Present Perfect makes the reference time (R) coincide with speech time (S), such that the config- uration becomes E < R,S. Therefore, since temporal adverbials are argued to modify or target the reference time (R), the Present Perfect becomes incompatible with past-referring temporal adver- bials, because these adverbs cannot target or modify a reference time that coincides with speech time. Other Western European languages, however, such as Italian (Squartini and Bertinetto 2000), French (Vet 1980, 1992) or German (Musan 2002, Schaden 2009), do allow their corresponding PERFECT markers (i.e., Passato Prossimo, Passé Composé, Perfekt) to combine with past-referring adverbials, showing that the aforementioned constraint does not hold crosslinguistically. In a trans- lation from (1), (2) illustrates this for Italian, while (3) does so for French, and (4) for German:2 (2) Chris è partito oggi alle tre. Chris be.PRS.3SG leave.PST.PTCP today at.the three lit. ‘Chris has left today at three o’clock.’ (3) Chris est parti aujourd’hui à trois heures. Chris be.PRS.3SG leave.PST.PTCP today at three hours lit. ‘Chris has left today at three o’clock.’ (4) Chris ist heute um drei Uhr abgefahren. . Chris be.PRS.3SG today at three hours leave.PST.PTCP lit. ‘Chris has left today at three o’clock.’ The Dutch PERFECT marker, the Voltooid Tegenwoordige Tijd (VTT, henceforth), is not affected by this constraint either, as (5a) shows. Rather, as (5b) exemplifies, the PERFECT is said to be preferred over the Dutch PAST, the Onvoltooid Verleden Tijd (OVT, henceforth), in such contexts (de Swart 2007, van der Klis et al. 2022): (5a) Chris is vandaag om drie uur vetrokken. Chris be.PRS.3SG today at three hours leave.PST.PTCP lit. ‘Chris has left today at three o’clock.’ (5b) #Chris vertrok vandaag om drie uur. Chris leave.PST.3SG today at three hours lit. ‘Chris left today at three o’clock.’ The dialectal varieties of Peninsular Spanish spoken in Madrid and its surroundings appear to re- flect an intermediate point in its availability to combine the Spanish PERFECT marker –the Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto– with past-referring temporal adverbials. These dialects allow the PERFECT to 2 For interlinear glosses, we use the abbreviation system and formatting conventions of the Leipzig Glossing Rules, which can be found at https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/pdf/Glossing-Rules.pdf. Additionally, we use PREFL as in ‘pseudoreflexive’ to refer to the morphosemantic value of se in Spanish that can appear with some intransitive verbs such as ir ‘to go’, resulting in a different meaning, as in irse ‘to leave’. Proceedings of ELM 2: 61-71, 2023 Martı́n Fuchs and Martijn van der Klis: Crosslinguistic differences on the Present Perfect Puzzle. 62 https://doi.org/10.3765/elm https://www.elm-conference.net/ express a past event anchored to a specific time in the past, as long as the event has occurred in a time that is included in the day of utterance (Harris 1982, Schwenter 1994, González et al. 2019, Fuchs & González 2022). This contrast is shown in (6a-b) and (7a-b): (6a) Chris se ha ido hoy a las tres. Chris PREFL have.PRS.3SG leave.PST.PTCP today at the three lit. ‘Chris has left today at three (o’clock).’ (6b) #Chris se fue hoy a las tres. Chris PREFL leave.PST.PFV.3SG today at the three lit. ‘Chris left today at three (o’clock).’ (7a) *Chris se ha ido ayer. Chris PREFL have.PRS.3SG leave.PST.PTCP yesterday lit. ‘Chris has left yesterday.’ (7b) Chris se fue ayer. Chris PREFL leave.PST.PFV.3SG yesterday lit. ‘Chris left yesterday.’ As (6a) indicates, Spanish allows its PERFECT to combine with temporal adverbials (hoy a las tres ‘today at three o’clock’) that create the relation E,R ⊆ day(S); that is, a relation in which the reference time (R) coincides with the event time (E), and both of these times are properly included within the day of the speech time (S). Moreover, in these cases, Spanish not only seems to allow the use of this marker, but also to prefer it over the Spanish PERFECTIVE PAST, the Pretérito In- definido, as in (6b). Conversely, when the event time (E) is anchored to a past reference time (R) before the day of utterance (S), creating a relation E,R < day(S), as in (7), with the adverb ayer ‘yesterday’, only the PERFECTIVE PAST –the Pretérito Indefinido– seems to be allowed, as in (7b), while the Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto in (7a) is said to be ungrammatical. That is why the Span- ish PERFECT has been defined as a hodiernal (i.e., relating to the present day) past marker, a temporal distinction that has been shown to be at play with specific dedicated markers in some other languages and language families (e.g., Comrie 1976, Dahl 1985). There are other properties of past-referring temporal adverbials that seem to play a role in their compatibility with PERFECT markers. For example, some work in English has provided indi- cations that deictic adverbials (i.e., adverbials whose reference is calculated with respect to the speaker’s time/space center of reference) behave differently with respect to their (in)compatibility with the English Present Perfect (e.g., Hitzeman 1995). Different from (1), the Present Perfect seems to be able to combine with deictic past-time referring adverbials that include speech time (S), such as this afternoon, as in (8): (8) Chris has left / left York this afternoon. This sentence is acceptable with the Present Perfect even if this deictic adverb could techni- cally be temporally locating the event of Chris’ leaving at the exact same time that the adverbial at three o’clock, as in (1), a sentence that is considered ungrammatical with the Present Perfect. The main account for this pattern is that deictic adverbs target a relation in which reference time (R) is situated at speech time (S), and therefore do not create an incompatibility with the temporo- aspectual configuration of the PERFECT. However, the role of deixis in the compatibility of the Present Perfect with past-referring temporal adverbials has not been systematically tested either in English or in Spanish. Proceedings of ELM 2: 61-71, 2023 Martı́n Fuchs and Martijn van der Klis: Crosslinguistic differences on the Present Perfect Puzzle. 63 https://doi.org/10.3765/elm https://www.elm-conference.net/ Additionally, the example in (8) presents an adverbial that is both deictic and hodiernal, but it is also possible that these properties play each an independent role. Parallel corpus work (van der Klis et al. 2022) actually indicates that standard written Peninsular Spanish not only allows its PERFECT to combine with temporal adverbials that locate the event within the day of utterance, but also with deictic adverbials such as este mes ‘this month’, which locate the event within an interval that is calculated from speech time and includes the day of utterance, but can also temporally locate the event before that day (e.g., an event that occurred this month might have happened twelve days ago). This difference in the temporal extension of deictic adverbials (i.e., whether the time span they define includes or is included in the day of utterance) has not been systematically explored either. In the following sections, we present an experimental study on the acceptability of different past-time referring adverbials with the PERFECT and the PAST markers of English, Spanish, and Dutch –with the expectation that the latter works as a control language, since we predict its PERFECT to have no restrictions to locate events in the past.3 Our main goal is to clarify the relationship between the temporal and referential properties expressed through adverbials and the use of PERFECT and PAST markers crosslinguistically. To this end, we conducted an acceptability judgment task on the use of PERFECT and PAST markers in these three languages to express differently tem- porally located past events. We consider a twofold distinction of past-referring temporal adverbials: temporal proximity and deixis. First, (6) and (7) indicate variation between adverbials related to the day of utterance and those that are not, showing the relevance of temporal proximity. Second, (1) and (8) drive a distinction between deictic and non-deictic adverbials. We describe the specifics of the experimental methodology in Section 2, we present the results in Section 3, and we discuss them and advance a general conclusion in Section 4. 2. Methods. 2.1. MATERIALS. We investigate UK English, Peninsular Spanish, and Netherlandic Dutch4 use of PERFECT and PAST markers in combination with different temporal adverbials that we distinguish crossing two independent variables described directly below: • Temporal Proximity (T), which in +T cases refers to adverbials that are related to the day of utterance by being included in it (e.g., this morning), overlapping with it (e.g., today) or including it (e.g., this month), and conversely, in -T cases designates adverbials such as last month, which do not include or are included in the day of utterance. • Deixis (D). This variable refers in +D cases to adverbials whose temporal reference is deic- tic in nature. For example, to place an adverb such as yesterday on the timeline, we need information about the speaker’s temporal location at reference time. Conversely, -D adver- bials, such as in November, can be more easily placed on the timeline independently from the speaker’s center of reference.5 3 Interestingly, the Dutch VTT only presents no restrictions when it deals with events in dialogue or single sen- tences. To refer to states in the Past, or to express narrative discourse (i.e., sequences of events in the past), Dutch also needs to resort to its PAST marker, the OVT (e.g., Le Bruyn et al. 2019). 4 We decided to test these European varieties since the parallel corpus work that identified some of the constraints that seem to be at work in the distributions of PERFECT and PAST markers in these languages (e.g., Le Bruyn et al. 2019, van der Klis et al. 2022) based its claims on originals and translations in these dialectal varieties. 5 Of course we claim this ‘independence’ of -D adverbs only in relation to the +D cases, since an adverb such as in November also usually refers to either the previous or the following November with respect to speech time. Proceedings of ELM 2: 61-71, 2023 Martı́n Fuchs and Martijn van der Klis: Crosslinguistic differences on the Present Perfect Puzzle. 64 https://doi.org/10.3765/elm https://www.elm-conference.net/ Each of these variables has two levels, so that the experimental design, including the gram- matical marker as an independent variable, consists of 8 conditions (2x2x2). We created 8 different contexts, for a total of 64 experimental stimuli, presented in Appendix A (only in English for reasons of space). We organized these stimuli in a Latin Square design, so that each participant only saw one experimental condition per context. We additionally created 96 fillers of three dif- ferent categories: (i) cases that convey either an experiential or a pluractional eventive meaning, with adverbs such as once or twice, which in the three languages are usually expressed with the PERFECT instead of the PAST (e.g., de Swart, forthcoming); (ii) cases with wh-questions and tem- poral sluices, which are assumed to be only acceptable with the PAST in the three languages (see Tellings & Fuchs, in prep., for reporting of these results); and (iii) unrelated fillers on the use of PRESENT and PROGRESSIVE markers to express futurate readings. Each stimulus was displayed separately and was accompanied by an introductory context. All experimental sentences convey an achievement to control for lexical aspect (since achievements have no temporal extension, and can be placed directly on the timeline, unlike accomplishments or activities). An example item in English is shown below, with its introductory context in (9) and the different possible experimental conditions in Table 1: (9) Peter and Theresa are planning to go to a concert next weekend. Peter offers to go get the tickets later today, but Theresa tells him: Condition Marker Adverbial Continuation PERFECT +T, +D I have purchased mine this morning It was cheaper that way. PERFECT +T, -D at midnight PERFECT -T, +D last month PERFECT -T, -D in November PAST +T, +D I purchased mine this morning PAST +T, -D at midnight PAST -T, +D last month PAST -T, -D in November Table 1: Experimental conditions, illustrated with an example, crossing three independent varia- bles: grammatical marker, temporal proximity (T) and deixis (D), with two levels each. 2.2. PROCEDURE. Previous work on this topic has mostly relied on introspection (e.g., Klein 1992) or production data such as corpora (e.g., van der Klis et al. 2022) or force-choice tasks (e.g., Schwenter 1994), where results are binary (presence or absence of a specific marker). Moreover, corpus data of specific marker-adverb combinations can be relatively scarce. Since large-scale judgment data can provide a more nuanced perspective than corpus data (Kepser & Reis 2005, Francis 2022), not only showing the best form in a given context, but also indicating preferences between forms, we decided to run an online acceptability judgment task in which participants rated individually presented sentences in a 5-point Likert scale. They also had to answer yes-no com- prehension questions, which followed 75% of the items, included to check that participants were paying attention to the experimental stimuli that they had to rate. Each participant saw a total of 8 experimental stimuli and 16 fillers. The allotted time to complete the task was of 15 minutes, with Proceedings of ELM 2: 61-71, 2023 Martı́n Fuchs and Martijn van der Klis: Crosslinguistic differences on the Present Perfect Puzzle. 65 https://doi.org/10.3765/elm https://www.elm-conference.net/ an additional 5 minutes to read and sign a consent form and fill in some basic demographic infor- mation. Participants were compensated with 4 euros for completing the task.6 2.3. PARTICIPANTS. 160 subjects per language completed the task, allowing to us to obtain, when combined, 20 full datasets per language under examination. English and Spanish participants were recruited through Amazon MTurk, where we were able to control for their IP addresses to make sure that they were from the United Kingdom and Spain, respectively. They had to indicate the region where they lived, and, by self-report, they were from all regions of the United Kingdom and Spain, but mostly from the Greater London and Greater Madrid areas. In the case of Dutch, we recruited participants through Neerlandistiek.nl, a website dedicated to Dutch language and culture. Participants also came from all regions of The Netherlands, but were mostly from the Utrecht region. 3. Results. All participants performed above 75% accuracy in the comprehension questions, so no participant was excluded from data analysis. The included fillers worked as we had expected (high ratings for the PERFECT and low ratings for the PAST across languages in filler condition (i) / low ratings for the PERFECT and high ratings for the PAST in wh-questions and sluices, in condition (ii)), providing additional support that participants were sensitive and attentive to the task. We do not find significant differences in the ratings across geographical regions in any of the languages, so we report the data in full per language on the remainder of the paper.7 Mean acceptability scores per experimental condition in each of the languages under study are reported in Table 2: Type of adverbial Marker English Spanish Dutch +T, +D (this morning) PERFECT 4.03 4.05 4.28 PAST 4.42 4.31 3.37 +T, -D (at midnight) PERFECT 3.34 4.33 3.78 PAST 4.33 4.03 3.14 -T, +D (last month) PERFECT 3.42 3.14 4.37 PAST 4.51 4.53 3.58 -T, -D (in November) PERFECT 3.44 3.21 4.07 PAST 4.53 4.53 3.19 Table 2: Mean acceptability scores by experimental condition in each language. Since we are interested in the distribution of these markers and their compatibility with dif- ferent kind of adverbials in each of these languages, we performed separate statistical analysis per language. We subjected the data to linear mixed-effect analysis, which were performed with ran- dom intercepts for subject and item, and fixed effects for the interaction of grammatical marker, temporal proximity and deixis. 6 The study was approved by the Faculty Ethics Assessment Committee of the Faculty of Humanities (FEtC-H) of Utrecht University (reference number: 20-249-03). 7 This was particularly surprising in the case of Spain, since previous reports indicate a wider use of the PAST in some of the Northern regions (e.g., Azpiazu 2013, 2015). We consider that the lack of variability in our study is probably due to the nature of the task, which allows to rate both markers as (un)acceptable. However, we recognize that further exploration with a more controlled recruitment process could provide results where that dialectal variation within Peninsular Spanish is observed. Proceedings of ELM 2: 61-71, 2023 Martı́n Fuchs and Martijn van der Klis: Crosslinguistic differences on the Present Perfect Puzzle. 66 https://doi.org/10.3765/elm https://www.elm-conference.net/ In Dutch, we find a main effect of marker (χ2(2) = 32.117; p < .001), favoring the PERFECT over the PAST across all conditions (β = 0.8031; p < .001). Figure 1 shows the means across con- ditions in this language. Figure 1: Mean acceptability scores by experimental condition in Dutch (*** = p < .001; ** = p < .01, * = p < .05; NS = not significant). Spanish shows a significant interaction of Temporal Proximity*Marker (χ2(1) = 47.12; p < .001), with no effect of deixis. In the -T condition, there is a main effect of marker (χ2(1) = 57.07; p < .001), favoring the PAST over the PERFECT (β = 1.353; p < .001), but in the +T condition, there is no significant effect of marker (χ2(1) = 0.016; p = .90). A summary in terms of means per ex- perimental condition for Spanish is shown in Figure 2. Figure 2: Mean acceptability scores by experimental condition in Spanish (*** = p < .001; ** = p < .01, * = p < .05; NS = not significant). Finally, in English, there is a significant effect of Temporal Proximity*Deixis*Marker (χ2(2) = 6.373; p < .05), and a main effect of Marker, favoring the PAST over the PERFECT in all conditions Proceedings of ELM 2: 61-71, 2023 Martı́n Fuchs and Martijn van der Klis: Crosslinguistic differences on the Present Perfect Puzzle. 67 https://doi.org/10.3765/elm https://www.elm-conference.net/ (β= 1.0875; p < .001). The interaction effect arises because there is less of a categorical difference in the +T,+D condition, but a post-hoc test with Tukey correction still shows the effect of Marker (β= 0.394; p = .035). Figure 3 presents a bar graph with the means per condition in English. Figure 3: Mean acceptability scores by experimental condition in English (*** = p < .001; ** = p < .01, * = p < .05; NS = not significant). An interesting, more nuanced result is also revealed in English when subdividing +T,+D ad- verbials by whether the adverb includes the day of utterance or is included in it. In those cases, we find a significant marker effect in the first case(χ2(1) = 6.7711; p <.01) favoring the PAST over the PERFECT (β= 0.5931; p < .001), but the effect disappears in adverbs included in the day of utterance (χ2(1) = 0.5942; p = .4408; PERFECT mean = 4.25; PAST mean = 4.38), where both markers produce ratings not significantly different. A bar graph showing this contrast is presented in Figure 4. Figure 4: Mean acceptability scores in English for conditions that include adverbs that are +Tem- poral Proximity and + Deixis, distinguished by whether the adverb includes the day of utterance (e.g., this month) or is included in it (e.g., this morning) (*** = p < .001; ** = p < .01, * = p < .05; NS = not significant). Proceedings of ELM 2: 61-71, 2023 Martı́n Fuchs and Martijn van der Klis: Crosslinguistic differences on the Present Perfect Puzzle. 68 https://doi.org/10.3765/elm https://www.elm-conference.net/ In summary, Dutch speakers prefer the VTT –its PERFECT marker– over the OVT –its PAST marker– across the board. Spanish speakers accept the PERFECT when the adverb is linked to the present, but there is no preference for the Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto in the +T condition: the Pretérito Indefinido receives similar ratings. English speakers prefer the Simple Past in all condi- tions but they accept the Present Perfect with deictic hodiernal adverbials, especially when the adverb is included in the day of utterance. 4. Discussion and general conclusion. This study had the objective of experimentally testing the acceptability of PERFECT and PAST markers in combination with various past-time referring adver- bials in English, Spanish, and Dutch, with the ultimate goal of providing a more thorough and crosslinguistically valid account of the Present Perfect Puzzle (Klein 1992). Based on previous claims in the literature, we assumed that the dimensions of variability in the temporal and referen- tial properties of adverbials that could have an effect on the acceptability of these markers were whether the adverb indicates a time span that is included in the day of utterance (i.e., hodiernality) and whether the time span is calculated from the speaker’s center of reference (i.e., deixis). Firstly, the results from our acceptability judgment task confirm the patterns previously re- ported in the literature in these languages (e.g., van der Klis et al. 2022 for Dutch; Schwenter 1994 for Spanish; Klein 1992, Hitzeman 1995 for English). Dutch allows its PERFECT to combine with any kind of past-referring adverbial, Spanish only allows the PERFECT form to appear when adver- bials are hodiernal, and English prefers its PAST marker to make reference to past events, but allows its PERFECT to appear when the adverbs that it combines with are both deictic, and indicate a time span included in the day of utterance. Additionally, our experimental data refines these generalizations with respect to the distribu- tion of PERFECT and PAST markers across languages. The behavioral results not only provide wider empirical support for previous claims, but also deepen our understanding about the effect that temporal and referential properties expressed by past-referring adverbials might have on the cross- linguistic distribution of these markers, revealing some patterns previously undescribed. In the case of Spanish, we did not only show that the Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto is allowed to express events that adverbials situate within the day of utterance (e.g., this morning), but also that these events can be situated further away in time, as long as the reference time is kept at speech time so that the time span that the adverb indicates is calculated from the deictic center (e.g., this month). Moreover, and contra previous descriptions in the literature (e.g., Schwenter 1994, Az- piazu 2013), our experimental data also revealed that the Spanish PERFECT may be the preferred form to express these hodiernal events, but the Pretérito Indefinido –the Spanish PERFECTIVE PAST– is also acceptable in these contexts. The English experimental data also provides an additional insight. The English Present Per- fect is allowed to combine with adverbials that are both deictic and that signal an interval which is temporally close to speech time. However, to properly account for the patterns in the data, we need to make a distinction between ‘proper hodiernality’ and ‘extended hodiernality’, since English only allows its PERFECT to combine with deictic adverbials that are ‘properly’ hodiernal –that is, adverbials that indicate a time span included in the day of utterance–, and rejects the use of the PERFECT when the deictic adverbial indicates an interval that includes the day of utterance. This distinction had not been previously reported, and might be relevant for understanding the distribu- tion of PERFECT and PAST markers more widely. All in all, we conclude that, aside from providing results that specify a finer grained picture of the Present Perfect Puzzle from a crosslinguistic perspective, this study functions as an Proceedings of ELM 2: 61-71, 2023 Martı́n Fuchs and Martijn van der Klis: Crosslinguistic differences on the Present Perfect Puzzle. 69 https://doi.org/10.3765/elm https://www.elm-conference.net/ illustration of how behavioral methods in experimental linguistics can be brought to bear on clas- sical theoretical problems in semantics and pragmatics. References Azpiazu, Susana. 2013. Antepresente y pretérito en el español peninsular: revisión de la norma a partir de evidencias empíricas. Anuario de Estudios Filológicos 36, 19-31. Azpiazu, Susana. 2015. La variación antepresente/pretérito en dos áreas del español peninsular. Verba 42, 269-292. https://doi.org/10.15304/verba.42.1371 Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect. An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Prob- lems. 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Forthcoming. Perfect variations in Romance. Isogloss. Tellings, Jos & Martín Fuchs. In prep. Sluicing and temporal definiteness. Vet, Co. 1980. Temps, Aspects et Adverbes de Temps en Français Contemporain. Genève: Droz. Vet, Co. 1992. Le passé composé: contextes d’emploi et interprétation. Cahiers de Praxématique 19, 37–59. Appendix A: Experimental stimuli 1. Patrick and Carl are roommates who want to spend the summer abroad, but they are not sure where to go. The application for international internships is due tomorrow. When Patrick sees Carl at home, Carl tells him: I’m very happy, I signed / have signed a rental contract for a New York City apartment (at two in the afternoon / this evening / on Monday / last night). 2. Andrew is looking for his earplugs, but he cannot find them. He’s on the phone with his friend Paul, who tells him: That’s frustrating, I know how you feel. Mine were lost, but I have found / found them (at noon / this week / on Friday / last weekend). 3. Sandra and Christine are planning their wedding. There’s little time left before the cere- mony, but there are still many things that need to be done. While having dinner, Christine tells Sandra: Oh, by the way, I picked up / have picked up the invitations (at four / this afternoon / on Sunday / the day before yesterday), so that’s one less thing on our list. 4. Sandra used to have an old TV that her friend Nick would always complain about whenever they watched TV at her place. This time, when Nick comes to visit, Sandra tells him about a new appliance store in town, and announces: I bought / have bought a new TV (at nine AM / today / on Tuesday / last week) at their grand opening sale. 5. Linda and Frank are meeting for dinner at the Italian restaurant where Linda also works. When Frank gets there and looks at the menu, Linda tells him: I tried / have tried the lasagna (at lunch / this month / on Wednesday / yesterday). It is delicious. 6. Peter and Theresa are planning to go to a concert next weekend. Peter offers to go get the tickets later today, but Theresa tells him: I purchased / have purchased mine (at midnight / this morning / in November / last month), during the pre-sale. It was cheaper that way. 7. Nicholas and Josephine are participating in a chess tournament. They are discussing their next opponents. Josephine is about to play against William, so Nicholas tells her: He defeated / has defeated me (at three / this year / in 2019 / last year), so you’d better be careful. 8. Sam has to take an oral German examination this afternoon, and he is a bit nervous about it. His friend Alex tells him: Laura passed / has passed the exam (at ten o’clock in the morning / this semester / in January / last winter), so you should talk to her. Proceedings of ELM 2: 61-71, 2023 Martı́n Fuchs and Martijn van der Klis: Crosslinguistic differences on the Present Perfect Puzzle. 71 https://doi.org/10.3765/elm https://www.elm-conference.net/