 It has often been observed that the present perfect in English has present relevance. For instance the continuation of (7a) with but I have found it again is infelicitous in English; the German translation of this sequence is acceptable, showing that the German perfect is more like a past tense (but see Kamp et al. 2015 for an extensive discussion, in Other Internet Resources). The same continuation is fine for sentence (7b). In this sense the perfect is a relative tense and the past an absolute tense in English. Let \(E\) be short for event time and let \(S, R\) stand for speech time and reference time respectively. 