The perfect triggers plural event construals in Galician and English

Abstract

In some languages, the reference to plural events is claimed to be grammatically encoded. While this phenomenon has been widely reported in relation to Aktionsart-changing morphology, pluractional readings have also been claimed to arise outside the verb phrase: For instance, it has been proposed that events expressed in the present perfect in English are necessarily repeatable in cases such as ‘I have travelled to Rome (before)’. The association of the perfect with readings of plural events appears to be fully systematic in other languages: In Galician, an understudied language spoken in Northwestern Spain, the perfect is claimed to even rule out single-event interpretations: Teño ido a Roma ‘I have travelled to Rome (*once)’. In two experiments, one in English and one in Galician, we investigated the psychological reality of these claims: How people think about which number of events to construe based on a simple sentence in the perfect (vs. past). Our findings reveal that the perfect leads people to imagine several events significantly more often than the past, in both languages, supporting the idea that pluractional event construals are reliably triggered by (semi)functional forms in typologically distant languages.