[Lingtyp] “young” and “old” PERFECT

[Hartmut Haberland]

The same phenomenon (restriction of the simple past (preterit) to written narratives) in German. Different from novels and short stories, news items in a serious newspaper can never start with a preterit in the first sentence (present perfect is always used), although they usually continue with preterits. Lately the preterit has become common in “news” items in non-quality newspapers as well (Bild-Zeitung), which suggests that they are not really news, but stories: those newspapers use conventions from literary genres (short stories), since their purpose is not to inform, but to entertain.
Hartmut
________________________________
Fra: Lingtyp [lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] på vegne af paolo Ramat [paolo.ramat at unipv.it]
Sendt: 28. maj 2015 10:19
Til: list, typology
Emne: Re: [Lingtyp] “young” and “old” PERFECT

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<mailto: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<tel:%2B972%202%20588%203809>
Fax: +972 2 588 1224<tel:%2B972%202%20588%201224>

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