Chapter 17
Calquing a quirk
The perfect in the languages of Europe
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.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The distribution of the perfect
- 3.Old High German and Old Saxon and the Charlemagne Sprachbund
- 4.Portuguese on the periphery
- 4.1The influence of Arabic
- 4.2Historical background of Al-Andalus
- 4.3The perfects of Arabic
- 4.4Possible influence on Romance perfects
- 5.Czech, Slovak, and the influence of German
- 5.1Historical background of German influence
- 5.2German influence on aspectual distribution of Czech
- 5.3Prescriptive reactions to German influence
- 6.Conclusions
-
Notes
-
Abbreviations of languages
-
References
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