[Lingtyp] “young” and “old” PERFECT

[Eitan Grossman]

Hi Sergey,

As a starting point, there's Joan Bybee's article "Main clauses are
innovative, subordinate clauses are conservative."
https://www.unm.edu/~jbybee/downloads/Bybee2001MainInnovativeSubConservative.pdf

Best,
Eitan



Eitan Grossman
Lecturer, Department of Linguistics/School of Language Sciences
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Tel: +972 2 588 3809
Fax: +972 2 588 1224

On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 12:53 AM, Sergey Lyosov <sergelyosov at inbox.ru>
wrote:

>
>
> Dear colleagues,
>
>  In the course of two-millennia recorded history of Akkadian (a
> long-extinct Semitic language), PERFECT as a specific “tense” first
> showed up in the epoch of historical record, around 2000 BC. And around
> 1500 this conjugation “degenerated” into SIMPLE PAST in independent
> narrative sentences, ousting the old (proto-Semitic) Preterit conjugation
> from this slot. Yet the older form of Preterit was preserved forever in
> wh-questions, negations, and relative clauses. This is as if in standard
> British English “He has written this paper” would have to be transformed of
> necessity into “the paper (that) he wrote,” but never into  “the paper
> (that) he has written,” etc. Do you know of any parallels for this kind of
> development or distribution?
>
>  Thank you very much,
>
>  Sergey
>
>
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