Levels of repeatability in the (experiential) Perfect: An empirical investigation in Galic

In some languages, the reference to plural events is claimed to be grammatically encoded. While this phenomenon has been widely reported in relation to Aktionsart-changing morphology (Newman 1980; Lasersohn 1995; Henderson 2017), pluractional readings have also been claimed to arise outside the VP (Stump 1981; Hoeksema 1983; Gillon 1987; Landman 1996; van Geenhoven 2004): For instance, it has often been proposed that events expressed in the present perfect in English are necessarily repeatable in cases such as ‘I have been in love (before)’ (Zandvort 1932; McCawley 1971; Inoue 1978; Dahl 1985; Michaelis 1994; Katz 2003; Mittwoch 2008). The association of the perfect with readings of plural events appears to be fully systematic in other languages: in Galician, an understudied language spoken in Northwestern Spain, the perfect is claimed to rule out single-event interpretations: Teño estado en Roma ‘I have been to Rome (*once)’ (Rojo 1974; Ferreiro 1996; Freixeiro Mato 1998; Álvarez and Xove 2002; Jardon Perez 2021, 2022). In this talk, I present the results of two experiments, one in English and one in Galician, investigating the psychological reality of these claims: How people think about which number of events to construe based on a linguistic utterance, in this case a simple sentence in the perfect (vs. past). Our findings reveal that the perfect leads people to imagine several events significantly more often than the past, in both languages, supporting the idea that pluractionality is a real phenomenon in people’s minds, and it can be triggered by (semi)functional forms outside the VP.