<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">The
Präteritumschwund is manifest in Yiddish, using the perfect as the sole past tense.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">Dan</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Aug 4, 2025 at 9:12 AM Christian Lehmann via Lingtyp <<a href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><u></u>
<div>
<p>As far as I know, that Präteritumschwund is a feature
characterizing the Bavarian dialect. For instance, it does not
occur in my variety of colloquial German.</p>
<p>But where it does occur, it is obviously loss of the feature of
'relevance to topic time' from the perfect tense, which renders it
synonymous with the past tense and thus able to replace (renew)
it. </p>
<div>Am 04.08.2025 um 17:32 schrieb Sergey
Loesov:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Does
<em>Präteritumschwund</em> in spoken German have
any bearing on examples from Standard German, or is the
question unimportant</span>?<span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"></span></p>
</div>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, 4 Aug 2025 at 17:17,
Christian Lehmann via Lingtyp <<a href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>>
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<div>
<p>Jürgen, quoting you:</p>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"CMU Serif"">I have not
actually seen a language that would be entirely free
of morphosyntactic constraints on viewpoint
aspectual interpretation. Even Finnish and German,
the languages commonly cited as lacking
grammaticalized viewpoint aspect markers, have a
perfect form (which in German is most commonly used
to express past reference, but retains polysemy as a
post-state/time marker). Colloquial German in
addition has a weakly grammaticalized progressive
construction for atelic VPs. </span></p>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p>First, a little dispute with you on this: Limiting our
classification of languages to a determined variety of a
language, we shall say that the progressive construction
is alien to standard German. The more interesting, because
more general, question seems to be whether the German
perfect, apart from being a tense, has some aspectual
value. Let's say that this value consists in signalling
relevance at topic time. E.g.:</p>
<ul>
<li>Ich habe Joghurt gekauft. 'I bought yogurt [which is
probably of current interest to you].'</li>
<li>Ich kaufte Joghurt. 'I bought yogurt [which is one of
the things that happened at that time].'</li>
</ul>
<p>This is a semantic feature of the perfect in some other
languages I have seen. The question is: Does it come under
the notion of aspect? Let tense be the grammatical marking
of the temporal relationship of a situation to some
temporal reference point, and aspect the grammatical
marking of the viewpoint taken as to the temporal
structure of the situation in itself; then current
relevance appears to be related, if anything, more closely
to tense than to aspect. However, this is not actually a
logical situation of tertium non datur; there are some
more verbal categories, and for some of them we may
even yet be lacking a general concept.</p>
<div>-- <br>
<p style="font-size:90%">Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann<br>
Rudolfstr. 4<br>
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<span style="font-variant:small-caps">Deutschland</span></p>
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<div>-- <br>
<p style="font-size:90%">Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann<br>
Rudolfstr. 4<br>
99092 Erfurt<br>
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</blockquote></div><div><br clear="all"></div><br><span class="gmail_signature_prefix">-- </span><br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">
</font><p style="margin:0in 0in 0pt"><i><span style="font-size:8pt"><font face="Times New Roman"></font></span></i></p><p style="margin:0in 0in 0pt"><i><span style="font-size:8pt"><font face="Times New Roman"><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> </font></span></i></p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">
</font><p style="margin:0in 0in 0pt"><i><span style="font-size:8pt"><font face="Times New Roman">Dan I. Slobin </font></span></i></p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">
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</font><p style="margin:0in 0in 0pt"><i><span style="font-size:8pt"><font face="Times New Roman">University of California,
Berkeley</font></span></i></p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">
</font><p style="margin:0in 0in 0pt"><i><span style="font-size:8pt"><font face="Times New Roman">email: <a href="mailto:slobin@berkeley.edu" target="_blank">slobin@berkeley.edu</a></font></span></i></p><p style="margin:0in 0in 0pt"><span style="color:rgb(61,133,198)"><i><span style="font-size:10.6667px"><a href="https://danslobin.academia.edu/research" target="_blank">https://danslobin.academia.edu/research</a><br></span></i></span></p><p style="margin:0in 0in 0pt"><i style="color:rgb(103,78,167)"><span style="font-size:8pt"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"><u><a href="https://archive.org/search?query=Slobin&sin=TXT" target="_blank">https://archive.org/search?query=Slobin&sin=TXT</a></u></span></span></i></p><p style="margin:0in 0in 0pt"><i><span style="font-size:8pt"><font face="Times New Roman"></font></span></i></p><p style="margin:0in 0in 0pt"><i><span style="font-size:8pt"><font face="Times New Roman">address: 2323 Rose St.,
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