Donald Trump, Frederick Douglass, and the present perfect
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The media (for example here, here) have noticed that there is something strange about Donald Trump’s use of the present perfect in a comment about Frederick Douglass at the start of Black History Month:
Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.
Somehow this utterance suggests that Trump believes that Douglass is still alive, raising the question of what aspect of its grammar leads to that inference.
Linguists have noted that sentences in the present perfect show a “lifetime effect”, an implication that the subject of the present perfect sentence is still alive. Chomsky (1970) pointed out a contrast between (1) and (2), with the first odd because of the fact that Einstein is no longer alive:
(1) ?Einstein has visited Princeton.
(2) Princeton has been visited by Einstein.
In contrast, (2) is ok because Princeton still exists (it counts as “alive”). So the questions are what causes the lifetime effect and to what extent the strangeness of Trump’s statement is due to it.
A crucial piece of the puzzle was identified by Inoue (1979). The lifetime effect is dependent on context, as seen by example (3) based on Inoue’s (this form of the data is from a paper of mine, Portner 2003):
(3) A: Which Nobel Laureates have visited Princeton?
B: Let’s see, Einstein has (visited Princeton), Friedman has, …
Inoue suggests that the lifetime effect is a special case of a broader requirement that the present perfect be “relevant” to the discourse topic, a headline-like proposition which itself has to concern the present (specifically, it should be repeatable). Various clues help to identify the discourse topic, including the subject-predicate structure of the sentence itself, intonation, and the surrounding context. For (1) the main clue is the sentence’s grammatical structure, and the topic would probably be something like “Einstein visits American Universities”. This topic does not concern the present (it’s not repeatable), since Einstein is dead. For (3) the preceding question helps identify the topic as “Nobel Laureates visit Princeton” or “Nobel Laureates visit American Universities”. Both of these potential topics do concern the present.
In contemporary semantics and pragmatics, the discourse topic is often understood not as a headline-like proposition, but as a question under discussion (Roberts 2012). So in (3), the topic is A’s question itself, while for (1) we have to infer a question. Given the information structure of English, we are likely to infer a question like “Where has Einstein visited?” Roughly speaking, (1) is odd because any answers to this question concern events that are not repeatable (he can no longer visit anywhere), while some of the answers to (3A) are repeatable. (In my own work, I take a slightly different approach which does not use repeatability, but this modernization of Inoue’s idea is close).
Returning to Trump’s comment, in order to understand it, we have to determine the identity of the topical question under discussion. After thinking it over, I still can’t tell what kind of discourse Trump thinks he’s addressing. On the one hand, without other context the grammatical structure of “Douglass has done an amazing job” suggests a question like “What kind of job has Douglass done?” For anyone informed of the fact that Douglass is no longer alive, this is strange, because it implies that events of Douglass doing some sort of job are repeatable. And unfortunately, there’s some textual support for thinking that Trump did make this mistake — the fact that he says that Douglass is being “recognized” more and more. But on the other hand, maybe in Trump’s mind he was addressing a question similar to Inoue’s (3A): “What kind of jobs have famous African Americans done?” or “Which African Americans have done an amazing job?” Indeed, this interpretation probably fits with his understanding of what Black History Month is all about and it is suggested by his surrounding remarks. If this is the question, he would not be showing evidence of a non-standard semantics for the perfect or ignorance of Douglass’s death. Instead, the oddness of his utterance would be due to his assumption that those listening to or reading his words share, or can easily figure out, what he takes the topical question to be. In other words, the problem with Trump’s statement would be in the pragmatics, in its failure to establish the mutual understanding needed for successful communication.