The Perfect in dialogue: Evidence from Dutch

We investigate the use of the PERFECT in dialogue in Dutch and – for comparison – report on data from Dutch narrative discourse as well as on data from both registers in English. Our approach is corpus-based with data drawn from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and its translation to Dutch. Our data reveal that the Dutch PERFECT is sensitive to the dialogue/narrative discourse distinction and competes with the PAST in dialogue along the event/state distinction. This is in line with earlier findings by Boogaart (1999) and de Swart (2007) and lays the foundation for an analysis of the PE... Mehr ...