[Lingtyp] lifespan of Perfect

Thu Apr 14 13:13:26 UTC 2016

Dear Nigel,

1.       Hm, you are right in that in order to calculate the timespan of Latin-Romance perfects we need to figure out when they started. But the question is if we also need to know if they were calqued on something in Greek or not. And this raises another problem for the calculation: if we suppose that this is the case, should we then add the lifespan in Greek to that in Latin-Romance? I assume Sergey was thinking of the lifespan in individual languages.

2.       When you say “they have a shared origin”, that appears to refer to the different European languages. But that is not the relevant question here. The problem is whether we can exclude that the perfects in the various languages have influenced each other. More concretely, can we be reasonably sure that the “Präteritumschwund” in southern German, spoken French, and northern Italian happened independently? I would say that the odds are rather that they are not.

Östen

Från: Nigel Vincent [mailto:nigel.vincent at manchester.ac.uk]
Skickat: den 14 april 2016 14:06
Till: Östen Dahl <oesten at ling.su.se>
Kopia: lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Ämne: RE: [Lingtyp] lifespan of Perfect

Dear Östen,
Two thoughts in that connection:

1. I think the precise origin does matter since how else are we to calculate the timespan? And in the specific case of the Romance periphrastic perfects there are big differences. On the old so-called 'karstic' view there are examples of 'habeo' + Past Part in Plautus that already display a perfect meaning which then so to speak goes underground and resurfaces in late Latin. However, on the view that emerges from the work of Adams and Haverling there aren't any convincing examples until the 6th or even 7th century, i.e. almost a millennium later. That gives a very different lifespan for the construction.

2. I'm not sure why we can't take the different European languages as independent cases even if they have a shared origin. The historical profile is very different between English, Swedish and German and arguably after a certain point these are independent historical sequences. The same goes for the differences between sub-families of Romance. And Greek, on the assumption that the origin there is post-Byzantine which is what I have seen argued by people like Amalia Moser, is yet a different profile.

Best
Nigel

Professor Nigel Vincent, FBA MAE
Professor Emeritus of General & Romance Linguistics
The University of Manchester

Linguistics & English Language
School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
The University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL
UK

http://staffprofiles.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/Profile.aspx?Id=nigel.vincent
________________________________
From: Östen Dahl [oesten at ling.su.se]
Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2016 11:31 AM
To: Nigel Vincent
Cc: lingtyp
Subject: SV: [Lingtyp] lifespan of Perfect
Actually, the precise origin of European perfects is maybe not so relevant for Sergey’s question. My original point was rather that the further developments of perfects in various languages in western Europe cannot be taken as independent cases in determining the average cross-linguistic lifespans of perfects.
Östen

Från: Lingtyp [mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] För Nigel Vincent
Skickat: den 14 april 2016 12:08
Till: Paolo Ramat <paoram at unipv.it<mailto:paoram at unipv.it>>
Kopia: lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>>
Ämne: Re: [Lingtyp] lifespan of Perfect

A word of caution! Most people who have looked at the history of the Latin/Romance periphrastic perfects don't buy the story of a Greek origin - see work by Jim Adams and Gerd Haverling in particular. The chronology and the morphosyntactic distribution don't fit. And anyway there are lots of other sources for the Romance literary traditions; you only have to think of the various chronicles and troubador and other love poetry.
While I'm writing let me also mention an interesting Oslo doctoral thesis for which I was an 'opponent' last year. It is by Guro Fløgstad and is called 'Forking Paths' and chronicles the development of perfect meanings expressed by the synthetic preterite verb forms in Porteno Spanish within the last 100 years.
Nigel

Sent from my iPhone

On 14 Apr 2016, at 10:42, Paolo Ramat <paoram at unipv.it<mailto:paoram at unipv.it>> wrote:

On 13 April 2016 at 13:21, Östen Dahl <oesten at ling.su.se<mailto: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<mailto:mashaha at gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2016 6:32 AM
Cc: lingtyp<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
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<mailto: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<mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>] För Sergey Lyosov
Skickat: den 13 april 2016 19:59
Till: Hartmut Haberland <hartmut at ruc.dk<mailto:hartmut at ruc.dk>>
Kopia: lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>>; goetzsche at hum.aau.dk<mailto: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<mailto: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<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<mailto: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<tel:%2B972%202%20588%203809>
Fax: +972 2 588 1224<tel:%2B972%202%20588%201224>

On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 6:12 PM, Sergey Lyosov <sergelyosov at inbox.ru<mailto: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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