"Juan has been working for three hours"

[J. Clancy Clements (Kapil)]

Dear Mark,
Regarding all your questions, I addressed just these issues in my
dissertation (Verb Classes and Verb Class change in Spanish), from 1985
(under the name Joseph A. Clements). You'll find a lot of info there.
Eldemiro (sp?) Salas did his dissertation on this topic, focusing on
Spanish, from a formal semantic point of view.  (Univ. of California at
Davis dissertation, advisor Ojeda), 1995 or 1996.  Hope this helps.

saludos,

Clancy Clements

On Thu, 9 Apr 1998, Mark Davies wrote:

> I'm starting into some research on the historical development of the
> following type of construction in Spanish and Portuguese :
>
>         a) "John has been working for three hours"
>         b) "John had been working for three hours, when . . ."
>         c) "I've been working here since 1995"
>
> I've looked through the standard sources on tense and aspect (Comrie,
> Bybee, etc) and find very little regarding this kind of construction.
> Bybee et al _Evolution of Grammar_ (1994:62) calls it the "anterior
> continuing" and Comrie _Aspect_ (1976:60) refers to it as the "perfect of
> persistent situation".  Neither spends more than a sentence or two on the
> construction, however.
>
> Questions:
>
> 1) Is there a standard name for this type of construction?
>
> 2) Is anyone aware of any studies dealing specifically with this
> construction, especially those related to diachronic issues?  I've searched
> extensively on OCLC and in other bibliographies, and haven't found much at
> all.
>
> 3)  I'd like to get some sense of the cross-linguistic possibilities for
> the construction, and am wondering whether any of you might be able to
> email me with glosses for the following three sentences.  I already have
> Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Latin, Japanese, and
> Mandarin, but would appreciate any other languages.  E.g.:
>
>         SPANISH
>
>         a) hace tres horas que Juan trabaja
>              makes three hours that J. works
>             "John has been working for three hours"
>
>         b) hacia tres horas que Juan trabajaba
>              make-IMPF three hours that J. work-IMPF
>             "John had been working for three hours, when . . ."
>
>         c) trabajo aca desde 1995
>              I-work here since 1995
>              "I've been working here since 1995"
>
> I'd be happy to post a summary a summary of these responses if there is
> sufficient interest.  Thanks in advance.
>
> Mark Davies
>
>
> ==================================================================
> Mark Davies, Assistant Professor, Spanish Linguistics
> Dept. of Foreign Languages, Illinois State University
> Normal, IL 61790-4300
>
> Voice:309/438-7975      email:mdavies at ilstu.edu
> Fax:309/438-8038          http://138.87.135.33/~mdavies/
> ==================================================================
>