Deictic Projection of Present Perfect in Persian: A Semantic Analysis

This study provides a semantic analysis of the present perfect of Persian expressing immediate and definite futurity. This phenomenon will be tackled in terms of deictic projection. To this end, after a brief introduction of some of the related concepts, the paper examines the ways in which a Persian speaker employs the present perfect to actualize a future situation for his/her communicative ends. In a sense, the lexical, grammatical and pragmatic elements contributing to this specific use will be analyzed by the exemplification of deictic projection. The results obtained from this study reveals that the certainty of a given event is the speaker’s main motivation to use the present perfect tense designating futurity. Moreover, in order to have such a pragmatic use, the sentence in present perfect needs to be affirmative in most of the cases on the one hand, and the presence of an adverb of time referring to a limited period of time and pointing to a definite end point in future, is necessary, on the other. The semantic and contextual analysis of this kind of usage shows that an inchoative aspect for the verbs in these types of sentences are deemed operational. Although it is possible to project present perfect to express futurity in the case of verbs referring to an action and dynamic situations, such a use is not possible for state verbs, except for some limited cases in a specific context. Furthermore, in this particular kind of projection, a meaning of epistemic modality is generally observable.