Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
Traugott and Waterhouse (1968: 302) have made the interesting suggestion that the adverbials already and yet should be generated from a set of semantic features associated with the perfective, and that still may be related to the progressive in a similar way. The present paper hopes to show that still and anymore are actually more related to the PERFECTIVE than previously supposed, and that a description of these forms in structural semantic terms, particularly with respect to what Chafe (1970) calls the distribution of new information, helps to clarify the meaning of the perfective inflection.