Chapter published in:
Perfects in Indo-European Languages and Beyond
Edited by Robert Crellin and Thomas Jügel
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 352] 2020
► pp. 591–614

Chapter 17
Calquing a quirk

The perfect in the languages of Europe

| 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
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
Published online: 23 September 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.352.17dri
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