The meaning indicated by the English present perfect involves three aspects: the proposition under the scope of the perfect, a current state and contextual factors. This paper holds that semantically the English present perfect introduces to the discourse an eventuality that occurred before the present time and a current state evoked by the eventuality. The specificities of this state should be pragmatically inferred on the basis of the proposition under the scope of the perfect (i.e. base eventuality) and related contextual factors, and this may cause different interpretations. This paper also argues that the degree of difficulty in the interpretation of perfect meaning depends on the degree of the participation of contextual factors in the interpretation. In some cases, the proposition under the scope of the perfect is the direct cause of the current state. In other cases, there is no explicit causality relation, and the relationship between the proposition under the scope of the perfect and the current state is implicitly indicated by contextual factors.