'Hot news' and perfect change: mirativity and the semantics/pragmatics interface

This paper proposes an analysis of the hot news Present Perfect (PP) building on Nishiyama & Koenig's (2010) analysis of the perfect as denoting a perfect state introduced by a variable that needs to be pragmatically enriched. Pragmatic meaning is analysed extending Rett & Murray's (2013) representation of mirative meaning as the target state of a learning event, which I take to be the speaker's reaction of surprise more generally. The analysis is considered in the light of non-canonical uses of the PP in Australian English narratives and police media reports. I argue that hot ncc s usage is at the basis of such extensions and propose representations for uses in sequences of clauses expressing temporal progression and in clauses containing a definite past time adverbial. The paper concludes by discussing the present analysis in the light of previous research and its implication to our understanding of the grammaticalization of perfects.