Time and truth

The grammaticalization of resultatives and perfects within a theory of subjectification

Ulrich Detges | University of Tübingen

This paper is concerned with the “invisible hand” behind the polygenetic pathways of semantic change in grammaticalization. A comparison between Old English habban + Past Participle and Spanish tener + Past Participle brings to light specific discourse strategies which speakers use resultatives for. On the basis of this analysis, the paper re-examines the problem of explaining the shift from non-temporal to temporal meaning. It is argued that this shift is brought about by some very basic discourse strategies which are strong motives for repeated meaning change in the same direction.

Published online: 06 September 2000
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.24.2.05det

Cited by

Cited by 11 other publications

Arkadiev, Peter M. & Björn Wiemer

2020. In Perfects in Indo-European Languages and Beyond [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 352], ► pp. 124 ff.

Azpiazu Torres, Susana

2021. In The Perfect Volume [Studies in Language Companion Series, 217], ► pp. 214 ff.

Carlier, Anne

2017. Le système des démonstratifs en cours de restructuration en latin tardif : une séparation des rôles référentiel et pragmatique de la deixis. Langages 208:4 ► pp. 29 ff.

Coussé, Evie

2014. Lexical expansion in the HAVE and BE perfect in Dutch. Diachronica 31:2 ► pp. 159 ff.

Detges, Ulrich

2018. Te lo tengo dicho muchas veces. Resultatives between coercion, relevance and reanalysis. Open Linguistics 4:1 ► pp. 260 ff.

Gaeta, Livio

2005. In Grammatikalisierung im Deutschen,

Howe, Chad

2021. In The Perfect Volume [Studies in Language Companion Series, 217], ► pp. 440 ff.

Kuteva, Tania, Bernd Heine, Bo Hong, Haiping Long, Heiko Narrog & Seongha Rhee

2019. In World Lexicon of Grammaticalization,

Lindström, Liina & Ilona Tragel

2010. The possessive perfect construction in Estonian. Folia Linguistica 44:2

Schwenter, Scott A. & Rena Torres Cacoullos

2008. Defaults and indeterminacy in temporal grammaticalization: The ‘perfect’ road to perfective. Language Variation and Change 20:1 ► pp. 1 ff.

Silveira de Araujo, Leandro

2018. Uma revisão da história do "pretérito perfecto" no espanhol. Revista de Filología Románica 35 ► pp. 33 ff.

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