[Lingtyp] lifespan of Perfect

Fri Apr 15 09:26:16 UTC 2016

FYI: Guro's dissertation "Forking Paths", mentioned by Nigel, has just been
published by Brill as *Preterit Expansion and Perfect Demise in Porteño
Spanish and Beyond*. It is subtitled "A Critical Perspective on Cognitive
Grammaticalization Theory" and it is available in Open Access here
<http://www.brill.com/products/book/cognitive-grammaticalization-theory-porteno-spanish-and-beyond>
.

Steve

On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 12:08 PM, Nigel Vincent <
nigel.vincent at manchester.ac.uk> wrote:

> 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> wrote:
>
>
> 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 <mashaha at gmail.com>
> *Sent:* Thursday, April 14, 2016 6:32 AM
> *Cc:* lingtyp <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> 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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>>
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