[Lingtyp] lifespan of Perfect

[Maria Khachaturyan]

Dear Sergey,

A morphological exponent of perfect as a separate category, distinct from
preterit, can presumably be reconstructed at the level of proto-South Mande
< Mande family. Proto-South Mande is 2500 years old.

Hope that is helpful.

Maria

On 13 April 2016 at 13:21, Östen Dahl <oesten at ling.su.se> wrote:

> I think the question will be quite difficult to answer, for several
> reasons. One is that it will be hard to find a sufficient number of
> reasonably independent cases. The developments in European languages that
> you are referring to are too close to each other in time and space to be
> treated as separate from each other. You also need to have consistent
> criteria for the determining when a category comes into being and when it
> disappears, and also for choosing the set of categories you are
> generalizing over. That said, I think that 200-300 years is too low at
> least for perfects. For instance, all Scandinavian languages have perfects
> that are alive and well and show no strong tendencies to develop into
> anything else, and they have histories that go back a millennium at least.
> Your proposed figure seems to imply that perfects would be doomed to
> disappear almost as soon as they have shown up. I do not think there is
> evidence for such “programmed death”. This is not to deny that perfects are
> considerably more unstable than categories like the (Simple) Past
> /Preterits in Germanic or Slavic.
>
>
>
> Östen Dahl
>
>
>
> *Från:* Lingtyp [mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] *För *Sergey
> Lyosov
> *Skickat:* den 13 april 2016 19:59
> *Till:* Hartmut Haberland <hartmut at ruc.dk>
> *Kopia:* lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>; goetzsche at hum.aau.dk
> *Ämne:* Re: [Lingtyp] lifespan of Perfect
>
>
>
>
> Thank you! Sure. But this is einzelsprachlich.
>
> Среда, 13 апреля 2016, 18:04 +03:00 от Hartmut Haberland <hartmut at ruc.dk>:
>
> 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>:
>
>
>
> 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>
> 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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