Re: "Have" as perfective auxilliary in various languages

On 25 Feb, 01:54, "PaulSchrum" <paul.sch...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I consulted Bernd Heine's _World Lexicon of Grammaticalization_ and it
does discuss Perfect and Perfective. I was not able to make much out
of it. For example, in the sentence (p 231) "The periphrastic
resultative/perfect construction ('have' or 'be' + past participle) of
Germanic and Romance languages, for example, has occasionally extended
its use to marking past tense . . . " I am not precisely sure what he
means by "periphrastic resultative/perfect".

He tells you what he means: 'have' or 'be' + past participle.

To break it down a little:
periphrastic - this means that a bunch of separate 'words' are all
used to create a single form instead of just a single word (ie 'have
run' is a periphrastic formation in English, while 'ran' is not).

resultative/perfect - basically, a resultative tense is one that
focusses on the current, present implication (where 'current' is
determined by the time reference point of the sentence - let's assume
it means the same as the moment of the speech-act for now) of the
action described by the verb. In other words, 'I have arrived' means
the same thing as 'I am here'; 'he has died' means 'he is dead'. The
point is to look at the result of the verb. This is one of the basic
meanings of 'perfect'; as you know, the perfect can also be called
'present perfect' (as the pluperfect can be called 'past perfective');
in these tenses, the present/past in the name tells you where what I
called the time reference point is located.

What he's saying is that in some of the Romance or Germanic languages,
the 'have' auxiliary was originally used only when the verb was a
perfect in this resultative sense. Over time, it became extended to
generally being used with all past tenses. This is the case of modern
standard French (where the old, single-word forms like 'elle chanta' -
the 'passé simple' - have been replaced with periphrastic expressions
like 'elle a chanté', the 'passé composé') and some varieties of
German, amongst others.

On the whole, though I think the answer to my question is that the
phenomena is limited to Romance and Germanic languages while Swahili
is noteworthy in that it uses "be".

As Peter (was it Peter?) mentioned, not many languages have a verb for
'have'. Hindi and Persian, both Indo-European languages related to
Romance and Germanic, both use auxiliaries to conjugate their verbs,
but neither has a verb for 'have'. (They tend to use verbs like 'be',
'become', or 'stay' instead; Persian uses the verb for 'want' to give
a future, an interesting parallel to the English use of 'will', which
once upon a time meant 'want').

Another complication is that is rare for languages to have exactly
parallel verbal systems. Thus both English and Hindi have complicated
aspect structures that intersect with their tense pattern, making it
difficult to compare them with languages like French or German (where
aspect operates differently). (By 'aspect', I'm talking about the
difference between actions that have an internal time structure and
those that don't - in English, the difference between forms like 'he
sings' and 'he is singing' is a difference of aspect.)

But nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that even in languages with
both comparable (somewhat) tense/aspect structures and verbs that mean
'have', it is not necessarily used as an auxiliary. Probably the best
case in point would be Latin, which has only a very few number of
periphrastic tenses and uses 'be' to make those, not 'have'.

Now, given that the phenomenon is not universal, an equally
interesting question to ask would be, why is that Romance and Germanic
are so similar? The tense structures are extremely comparable, and
things like the French/German shared use of the periphrastic as their
main past form are quite remarkable. This is a topic that has been
discussed on this group before; I started a thread about it maybe a
year or so ago (maybe more) that brought much interesting stuff to
light.

Neeraj Mathur

.

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