[Lingtyp] “young” and “old” PERFECT

[paolo Ramat]

Dear Sergey,
if you are looking for limitations in the use of the 'old preterit'/'simple
past' beyond the syntactic difference alluded to by Joan Bybee remember
that the simple past is (almost) limited to narrative texts (novels and the
like) in contemporary French (and to a lesser extent in Italian): "il y a
deux ans il a fait un grand voyage" (spoken French) vs. "il y a deux ans il
fit  un grand voyage" (literary style), 'two years ago he did a long trip'.

Best,
Paolo

2015-05-27 5:39 GMT+02:00 Eitan Grossman <eitan.grossman at mail.huji.ac.il>:

> 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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