[Lingtyp] lifespan of Perfect

[Hartmut Haberland]

A classic must be Erika Mihevc, La disparition du parfait dans le grec de la basse époque; Ljubljana: Razprave SAZU, razred za filol. in lit. vede V, 1959, 93–154.

Hartmut Haberland

Den 13/04/2016 kl. 16.01 skrev Sergey Lyosov <sergelyosov at inbox.ru<mailto:sergelyosov at inbox.ru>>:


Dear colleagues,
by the “lifespan” of an “unstable” morphosyntactic category, I mean the time during which it is opposed to its nearest semantic partners. A good example is the interaction between the semantic Perfect and the semantic Preterit in a language. Say, in a certain variety of spoken German, “Ich habe gesprochen” and “Ich sprach” used to be opposed for some time, and then, in the course of the Präteritumschwund, “Ich sprach” fell out of oral usage, and  the erstwhile Perfect “Ich habe gesprochen” became a new Preterit. The same happened in various dialects of Spanish and Italian, with different outcomes, i.e., sometimes it was the new (analytical) form that has fallen in disuse.
The question is: what is known, typologically, about a medium/average lifetime of these “fragile” (because of their complex semantic organization) semantic categories?

Best,

Sergey



Среда, 13 апреля 2016, 8:23 +03:00 от Eitan Grossman <eitan.grossman at mail.huji.ac.il>:

Hi Sergey,

Could you explain a bit what you mean by 'lifespan'?

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 Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 6:12 PM, Sergey Lyosov <sergelyosov at inbox.ru<//e.mail.ru/compose/?mailto=mailto%3asergelyosov at inbox.ru>> wrote:


Dear colleagues,

what do we know about the life-time of “unstable” verbal categories, such as Perfect or Resultative? My studies of the history of the verb in Semitic languages make me suggest that this lifespan  may amount to some 200-300 years or so. Are there studies of the problem based on a representative sample of languages?

 Best,

Sergey






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