Cite as: Stanojević, Mateusz-Milan, and Renata Geld. 2011. “New Current Relevance in Croatian: Epistemic Immediacy and the Aorist.” In Cognitive Approaches to Tense, Aspect and Epistemic Modality, edited by Frank Brisard and Adele Patard, 159–79. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Renata Geld Mateusz-Milan Stanojević New current relevance in Croatian: epistemic immediacy and the aorist 1. Introduction 1 There are two ways of analyzing the aorist in Croatian grammars. Traditional grammars (e.g. Katičić 1991: 57-59; Barić et al. 1995: 413) describe the aorist as a general past tense used with perfective verbs denoting completed past. More contemporary-minded grammarians analyze the aorist as expressing recent past action (e.g. Raguž 1997: 185; Težak and Babić 1994: 265; Silić and Pranjković 2005: 192). For instance, a sentence such as: (1) Stigoh iz daleka. Arrive.PERF.AOR.1 st sg from far ‘I have arrived from far away.’ would be analyzed differently by the proponents of the two views. Whereas the former would claim that the aorist refers to absolute past time (with no connection to the present), the latter would analyze it as a tense expressing recent past action, completed just before the moment of speaking (this will be the view taken in this paper; hence we have translated (1) using the English present perfect).. Things are additionally complicated by views on the Croatian perfect tense 2 , which is claimed to symbolically express current relevance (at least in some contexts) by both schools (cf. e.g. the “traditionalist” Katičić (1991; 1992) and the more recent views by Silić and Pranjković (2005: 192-193)). Thus, if the Croatian perfect tense was to be used in this sentence: (2) Stigao sam iz Arrive.PERF.PARTICIPLE.sg.masc be.IMPERF.PRES.1 st sg from daleka. far ‘I arrived from far away.’ the very fact that the verb form stigao sam is in the perfect tense is claimed to connect it with the present. However, in spite of these claims and its name, the Croatian perfect is a general past tense, because it does not symbolically express perfect meaning (in the sense of current relevance, cf. e.g. Comrie 1976: 52), as shown by Stanojević and Geld (2005). Indeed, the Croatian perfect tense does not correspond to Dahl’s criteria for a perfect – the answers on the perfect questionnaire (Dahl 2000: 800-809) show that it is a general narrative past tense rather 1 The authors would like to thank Ricardo Maldonado Soto, Günther Radden, and the editors of the volume for their valuable suggestions and discussions. All the remaining inadequacies are our own. 2 The Croatian perfect tense is formed using the imperfective present tense of the verb biti (‘to be’) and the l- participle of the (perfective or imperfective) content verb, which is inflected for gender and number.