The term present perfective paradox refers to the following phenomenon: in a given language, there is a tense marker which is used to report on the ongoing present when it combines with stative verbs. With dynamic verbs, in turn, this tense marker refers to something else than the ongoing present - to the future, to the past, or to a habit. English and its simple present tense represent a well-known example. The simple present refers to the ongoing present with stative verbs: I have my laptop with me right now. But it cannot be used to report on the ongoing present with dynamic verbs: *I run to the bus station right now. What the simple present can express with dynamic verbs is a habitually reoccurring situation: I run to the bus station every morning. A similar thing happens in Slavic languages such as Polish and Russian.
It has been unclear until now whether this pattern can also be found outside of the well-studied languages of Europe, and if so, to what extent. This dissertation represents the first large-scale cross-linguistic study of the present perfective paradox, investigating a sample of 180 unrelated languages from all over the world. It is shown how investigating the cross-linguistic manifestation of this phenomenon provides more general insights into, among others, the way in which tense and time reference interact in the world’s languages, how different types of situations are construed linguistically through verbal morphology, and how grammar and epistemicity are related to each other.
