Abstract This study examines non-canonical uses of the Present Perfect (PrPf) with definite past time adverbials such as yesterday, last + NP, and ago in British English (BrE) and American English (AmE), drawing on data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) . While quantitatively marginal, these uses reveal a distinctive pattern: in pragmatically marked contexts, especially in spontaneous speech and media, the PrPf encodes both past anchoring and current relevance, violating canonical constraints. I argue that these instances reflect a strategy of relevance compression, where the PrPf functions as a discourse shortcut, simultaneously maintaining topic continuity and signaling temporal relevance. Ambiguous contexts, where current relevance and past perfective readings co-exist, are prevalent in AmE, where a past perfective interpretation may be salient. Ultimately, the study confirms that genre and register shape the distribution and interpretation of tense forms, with innovation concentrated in spoken, spontaneous contexts.
Vladimir Bondar (Fri,) studied this question.