Chapter published in:
Perfects in Indo-European Languages and BeyondEdited by Robert Crellin and Thomas Jügel
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 352] 2020
► pp. 592–613
Calquing a quirk
The perfect in the languages of Europe
Bridget Drinka | University of Texas at San Antonio
The have-perfect, found almost exclusively in
western Europe, has been identified as a “European quirk, unparalleled
elsewhere in the world” (Cysouw
2011: 425). The spread of this highly marked construction to
adjacent varieties provides us with an exceptional opportunity to observe
the conditions under which this calquing occurred, and to assess the role of
external as well as internal factors in the adoption of this structure in
closely-related, distantly-related, and unrelated languages. After a general
overview of the distribution of have-perfect calques across Europe,
three representative instances are presented: Old High German and Old Saxon,
Portuguese, and Czech. These examples illustrate, respectively, three
important principles of social conditioning connected with the grammatical
calquing: the role of prestige in the operation of ‘roofing’, the linguistic
repercussions of political and confessional realignment, and the capacity of
social motivation to outweigh internal linguistic factors.
Keywords: perfect, stratification, Charlemagne Sprachbund, roofing, confessional realignment, sociolinguistic motivation, West Germanic, Ibero-Romance, Arabic, West Slavic
Published online: 23 September 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.352.17dri
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.352.17dri
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