[Lingtyp] Perfect as a focal tense

[Lidia Federica Mazzitelli]

Dear Sergey,

I guess it's not exactly what you mean, but I wrote a paper that is already
accessible ahead-of-print in LT about the grammaticalization of change of
state markers into information structure markers in Austronesian. I
discusso change of state, ma some of my arguments apply to perfect, too.
Here the link:
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingty-2020-0129/html

Maybe the paper will not be very useful to you, but in the references you
may find useful works. In particular Ana Kraijnović and Kilu von Prince
have worked extensively on the focus meanings of the perfect.
All the best, Lidia

Il ven 24 gen 2025, 16:29 Stefan Savić via Lingtyp <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> ha scritto:

> 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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