perfect(s)

[Bjoern Wiemer]

Dear ALT-members and readers of this list,

in the end of March I lanced a question concerning semantic maps of
perfect(s) in the world's languages. In particular, I asked whether there
have been any refinements of what at one time was proposed by Lloyd
Anderson. Some people wrote to me afterwards. I'm very sorry that I haven't
managed to let the "community" my requests was directed to know what kinds
of reply I have received, the reasons for this delay being totally
unlinguistic and unscientific. So I hope you won't mind if I now send you
the data I have received.
        Actually, nobody could remember that there have been any such
refinements since Anderson's paper. But a couple of persons indicated to me
that, of course, the notion of perfect has been investigated much since
then, in particular, its relationship to the resultative, diathesis, aspect
and mood/modality has been elaborated. Here are two contributions I have
been made attention of:

1. Bisang und Sonaiya 1997. Perfect and beyond, from pragmatic
relevance to Perfect: The Chinese sentence particle le and Yoruba ti. In:
Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 50.2, 143 - 158.

2. Drossard, Werner (1991): "SITUIERUNG (Aspektualität, Modalität,
Temporalität) und PARTIZIPATION mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der
KASUSMARKIERUNG", in: Drossard, Werner; Haase, Martin, Studien zur
SITUIERUNG. Aspektualität, Modalität, Temporalität, Köln: Inst. f.
Sprachwiss., Univ. zu Köln (=Arbeiten des Kölner Universalien-Projekts
(AKUP) 83), 1-24.

Furthermore, as probably most of you anyway know, there is a EUROTYPE-volume
forthcoming, whose contents have been made accessible on a homepage in
Stockholm:
3. http://www.ling.su.se/staff/oesten/eurotyp/Contents.htm
        There is a whole chapter with several papers on the perfect.

I can add some bibliographic notes by myself. First of all:
4. TRK: Nedjalkov, V.P. (Red.) 1983. Tipologija rezul’tativnych konstrukcij
(rezul’tativ, stativ, passiv, perfekt). Leningrad.
        and its English translation (1988; Benjamins).

To my mind, among the best (up to date) contributions are also still:
5. Dahl, Ö. 1985. Tense and Aspect Systems. London-New York. (chapter on
Perfect)
6. Comrie, B. 1981. On Reichenbach's Approach to Tense. In: Papers from the
Seventeenth Regional Meeting of the CLS. ed, by R.A. Hendrick et al.
Chicago, 24-30.
7. Breu, W. 1988. Resultativität, Perfekt und die Gliederung der
Aspektdimension. In: Raecke, J. (Hrsg.): Slavistische Linguistik 1987.
München, 42-74.

And a very concise, but well written and insightful paper on the English and
Lithuanian perfect:
8. Geniusiene, E.: Sopostavitel’nyj analiz perfektnyx form v anglijskom i
litovskom jazykax. In: V.N. Jarceva (otv. red.): Sopostavitel’naja
lingvistika i obuchenie nerodnomu jazyku. Moskva: Nauka, 128-137.

There is also a monograph on the Modern Greek system basing on a typological
oriented theory of interaction between the lexical semantics (of verbs) and
aspect operators:
9. Leluda-Voß, Ch. 1997. Die Perfekterfassung und das neugriechische
Perfekt. Frankfurt/M. etc. (Europäische Hochschulschriften. Reihe XXI:
Linguistik. 181.)

See also a couple of contributions in the volume (based on the same theory
as in 9):
10. Breu, W. (Hg.) 2000: Probleme der Interaktion von Lexik und Aspekt
(ILA). Tuebingen: Niemeyer. (= Linguistische Arbeiten 412.)

Thanks agian to those who replied!
        With best regards,
Bjoern Wiemer.


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Dr. Bjoern Wiemer
Universitaet Konstanz
FB Sprachwissenschaft - Slavistik
Postfach 55 60 - D 179
D- 78457 Konstanz

e-mail: Bjoern.Wiemer at uni-konstanz.de
tel.: 07531 / 88- 2582
fax:  07531 / 88- 4007
		- 2741

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