[Lingtyp] Perfect as a focal tense

[Stefan Savić]

Dear Sergey,

I've been wondering about the same question for a while now. Although I
don't have an answer, I will present a paper about the use of the perfect
(vs. the synthetic past, i.e. the aorist and imperfect) in 18th century
Bulgarian together with Professor Barbara Sonnenhauser at ICHL27 in
Santiago (we're extracting data from Ivan Šimko's corpus of texts written
by Pop Punčo). I simplify it a bit here, but while it doesn't necessarily
encode focus per se, it does indicate that the temporal information about a
past event is not specified, demoted (i.e. less relevant/inferable than,
say, the information about the event type, its arguments etc.) which sets
it apart from the aorist or the imperfect (this is not to imply that every
denoted by an aorist or imperfect verb issues at a known or specified point
in time, but they typically construct a narration, which requires some kind
of temporal succession as the kern of the plot). I am also working on
testing this approach (regarding the type of information about an event) in
my analysis of the semantic distinction between the past and the
(non-narrative) present perfect in North Germanic (and perhaps at some
stage in English too).

Feel free to write to me if you have any questions.

Best regards,
Stefan

On Fri, Jan 24, 2025, 3:47 PM Sergey Loesov via Lingtyp <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:

> Dear colleagues,
>
> Are you aware of languages in which PERFECT is used to encode mainly the
> focus/comment/rheme  in functional sentence perspective, within the
> past-time domain? Or maybe you are familiar with some literature on the
> subject?
>
> Thank you very much!
>
> Sergey
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