It’s been a while since I’ve been to church: The use of the Present Perfect after the conjunction since

Abstract

ABSTRACT Previous research on the Present Perfect suggests that the latter is acceptable in since-clauses only if the situation expressed by the subordinate clause extends in time up until the present, as in Tony has been happy since he has been taking Prozac, i.e. if the Present Perfect in the since-clause is a Universal Perfect whose predication is true at all subintervals in the time-interval delimited by since and not an Existential Perfect whose predication is true only at a certain moment therein, as in *Tony has been happy since he has visited Cape Cod. The present study puts the implications of this claim and others found in the literature to the empirical test through an examination of all of the 2,621 occurrences of the Present Perfect in since-clauses with pronominal subjects in the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. A significant proportion of the data is shown to contradict the generalizations proposed in previous studies. An explanation capable of accounting for all of the uses of the Present Perfect in since-clauses is put forward based on the complex meaning of this verbal structure which involves the notion of present stative after-phase of a past situation. The Present Perfect is possible in a since-clause whenever the beginning of the after-phase serves to mark the beginning-point in the past from which the main-clause situation unfolds towards the present. The beginning of the after-phase is argued to be interpretable in two ways: either as the first moment after the end of the prior situation or as the first moment in the process of accruing the after-phase itself.