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Part of
The Perfect Volume: Papers on the perfect
Edited by Kristin Melum Eide and Marc Fryd
[Studies in Language Companion Series 217] 2021
► pp. 261–290

Chapter 11
The rise of the periphrastic perfect tense in the continental West Germanic languages

| Meertens Institute , Amsterdam

This article adopts the traditional claim in Dutch linguistics that periphrastic perfect-tense constructions gradually developed out of copular-like constructions with have and be. It argues that this development was made possible by the introduction of two morphological rules. The first rule derives verbal (event-denoting) participles from adjectival (property-denoting) participles, which gave rise to periphrastic perfect-tense constructions with transitive and mutative intransitive verbs. At a later stage this rule was replaced by a rule (still productive in present-day Dutch) that derives verbal participles from verbal stems, as a result of which the periphrastic perfect tense spread to non-mutative intransitive verbs. The article concludes by showing that this account is superior to Coussé’s (2008) flexible user-based account within the constructionist framework, which rejects the categorial distinction between adjectival and verbal participles.

Keywords: language change, periphrastic perfect tense, adjectival and verbal participle, copular and semi-copular verb, perfect auxiliary, “double perfect” construction, generative grammar, construction grammar
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The rise of the periphrastic perfect tense
  • 3.Theoretical background: Unaccusative and undative verbs
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1The transition from stage I to stage II
    • 4.2The transition from stage II to stage III
  • 5.Comparison with Coussé’s flexible user-based approach
  • Abbreviations
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.217.11bro
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