ABSTRACT
If someone says to you ‘Our car has broken down’, your reaction may simply be to feel sorry. For the linguist, though, even such a simple utterance calls for quite an elaborate explanation. As far as the meaning and the grammar of the sentence are concerned, a traditional description would try to paraphrase the meanings of the words used; it would analyze the clause pattern (here a simple combination of subject and verb or predicate), and would probably go on to discuss the use of the present perfect tense.
