Chapter 15
“Have-less perfects” in Norwegian
An Old Norse heritage
The constructions I investigate in this paper
can all be subsumed under the heading ‘have-omission’. This is also
the traditional analysis, to assume an omission of a semantically
superfluous auxiliary in these structures. A different perspective
however, and one that I will advocate here, is that there was never
an auxiliary there in the first place. From this perspective, the
constructions thus do not lack a perfect auxiliary (as the term
‘have-omission’ dictates), but instead these constructions employ
what only morphologically looks like a supine, i.e. an uninflected
past participle, in a syntactic function where you would expect a
different form (i.e. a preterit or an infinitive). Semantically
these constructions display a modal reading; counterfactuality or
irrealis, which I argue is conveyed by the supine-looking from
itself, and a linguistic heritage from Old Norse. Their
morphological, semantic, and syntactic traits suggest a common
underlying explanation for these constructions, and instead of
attributing these features to an invisible auxiliary, my explanation
puts the emphasis on the contribution of the visible element, the
“supine”.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The preterit subjunctive
- 2.1Preterit subjunctive in Old Norse
- 2.2Preterit subjunctive in Norwegian dialects
- 3.The supine form as a non-finite subjunctive marker
- 3.1The modal functions of past tense forms
- 4.Supine-for-infinitive constructions
- 4.1Preterit modal+ supine
- 4.2Perfect modal + supine
- 4.3Infinitival marker + supine
- 5.Conclusion
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
Abbreviations
-
References
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