[Lingtyp] lifespan of Perfect

Thu Apr 14 09:41:21 UTC 2016

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. 

  I think Östen is quite right. Don’t forget that (almost) all the European languages  developed their literary traditions on the basis of translations of the Bible and the Evangiles, either from Greek or Latin (that, on its turn,  had borrowed the periphrastic construct  habeo dictum from the ècho legòmenon of the Greek original texts).[*]. 

Best,
P. Rt.

[*] It is even possible that the Greek periphrastic construct followed an Anc. Hebrew model.

-------------------------------
Prof.Paolo Ramat
Academia Europaea
Università di Pavia
Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori (IUSS Pavia)

From: Maria Khachaturyan 
Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2016 6:32 AM
Cc: lingtyp 
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] lifespan of Perfect

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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