In this research, we intend to contribute to the understanding of the perfect aspect. More precisely, it is aimed at investigating the verbal forms that express said aspect, when associated with the present tense, in New Zealand English, in order to present evidence that advocates in favor of the proposed classification of Iatridou; Anagnostopoulou; Izvorski (2003), which divides this aspect into two types: universal perfect (UP) and existential perfect (EP). We also intend to show evidence in favor of Nespoli’s (2018) proposal for two syntactic projections, one related to each type of the perfect aspect (UPerfP and EPerfP). The main difference between both types of the perfect aspect would be related to the relationship between reference time and event time, with UP being when event time extends until reference time, including it, while EP being when event time finishes before reference time, although there is a repercussion of the event in the latter. This research is based on the hypothesis that there are verb forms that realize UP and not EP, associated with the present tense in New Zealand English and vice-versa. To test this hypothesis, an excerpt from ICE-NZ, a corpus with speech transcriptions, was analyzed and two types of tests were applied to native speakers: a cloze test and a multiple-choice test. With this study, we intend to identify the verbal forms used by native speakers of New Zealand English to express the two types of the perfect aspect.
Keywords: Aspect. Perfect. New Zealand English. Verbal forms
