The Icelandic Perfect: Examining Texture in Discourse

This paper reports the results of ongoing research on the Icelandic perfect. The present perfect has been stated to convey background information in narrative text. Newspaper artides comprise a different genre in that temporal sequence is not strictly maintained but the narrator/speaker embeds her/his perspectives into the news items by using linguistic means such as the present perfect. Based on recent work (Yamaguchi and Pétursson 2002) the paper examines semantic sub-domains of the hafa-perfect (present episodes, past episodes, and contrast) and demonstrates that the present perfect as the manifestation of expressiveness stands at the core of discourse, whereby other tense forms (e.g. simple past) serve background functions which help to interpret the present perfect.