On Adjunction, Complementation and the Problem of Present Perfectives in Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian

Abstract

We focus on the well-known fact that in BCMS simple present perfective sentences are in general unacceptable as independent clauses, in contrast to present imperfectives. A plausible analysis of these facts could be that they are in some sense syntactically impoverished, e.g., they are not full CPs, and for that reason they cannot function as independent clauses. We argue for an alternative analysis. We will first show that present perfectives can appear in unambiguous CP environments. The second argument comes from the behavior of complements of misliti ‘think’, which are ambiguous between propositional and future irrealis meaning. Present perfectives are felicitous in both contexts; crucially, propositional complements are unambiguously CPs. Instead of the syntactic explanation, we show that all the facts can be explained via semantic requirements of present perfectives, as in Todorović (2015).