Re: "Have" as perfective auxilliary in various languages


"PaulSchrum" <paul.schrum@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1172352013.787298.178410@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I have noticed that perfect tense in German and French use "have" as
auxilliary as English does. I have been wondering if this tendency is
"universal" among languages which use auxilliary verbs for the perfect
or whether it is just a coincidence among the three languages that I
know a little bit about.

[Preemptive yeah-I-know's:]

- Many motion related verbs in French use etre as the past and perfect
auxilliary.

- My knowledge of German is way limited, and for all I know there
could be many exceptions to using haben as the perfect auxilliary that
I am clueless about. If my comments warrant correction on this point,
please be kind.

You might like to refer to Bybee, Perkins &Pagliuca, The Evolution of Grammar. In particular, their chapter on "Anterior, perfective, and related senses". (Their "anterior" is what most people would call "perfect".) They say: "The lexical items which evolve into the gram[atical morpheme]s discussed in this chapter are almost all verbs, which can be divided into two major types: stative verbs, usually copulars, but also "have", "remain", and "wait"; and dynamic verbs, either movement verbs or verbs meaning "finish" or "be finished".

In their 94-language sample, 43 are listed as having one or more "grams with anterior as their only use". Of the 21 languages where the origin of the morphemes is known, in 14 it's "stative auxiliary". Of these, 12 have only "be" or similar (exist, wait, remain, ...), and two have "have"-- namely the only two modern European languages in their sample (Danish and Modern Greek, as it happens -- Danish, of course, has both "have" and "be".)

John.


John.

.

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