[Lingtyp] lifespan of Perfect

Fri Apr 15 12:35:52 UTC 2016

Hi Sergey,

I wonder if it might not be more useful to look at the age of constructions
in terms of stages rather than lengths of actual time, along the lines of
Bybee, Pagliuca & Perkins' 'futages' in their Evolution of Grammar
<http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo3683926.html> and its
pilot studies.

Sergey, as for assessing the stability of perfect constructions, why not
consider making a study of this? The way has been shown by Johanna Nichols
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Diversity_in_Space_and_Time>,
Balthasar
Bickel <http://www.distributionaltypology.uzh.ch>, Søren Wichmann & Eric
Holman <https://leidenuni.academia.edu/SørenWichmann>, and others. It might
be fruitful to try a version of the Family Bias Method, which might help
see whether the western European cases should be seen as independent cases
or not.

Best,
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 Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 12:26 PM, Steve Pepper <pepper.steve at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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@
>>> 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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>>
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