| Summary: | Writing about the English perfective in relation to still and anymore, Michael Morrissey (1973) made use of a helpful way of, isolating certain semantic features associated with them. He pointed out, among other things, that sentences containing still and anymore cave to do with a primary time of reference, often 'now and a secondary time, which is previous to the first. If these two times are symbolized by x, for the primary time, and y, for the secondary time, then his example 'Mr. Jones is still tampering with the lock' can be represented as +y+x; i.e., by virtue of containing still, the sentence includes both 'Mr. Jones is (now) tampering', hence +x, and 'Mr. Jones was )previously) tamperint hence +y.
|
|---|