Chapter 16
From have-omission to supercompounds
A wealth of English perfects
This paper adopts an historical perspective to
shed light on syntactic patterns exhibiting
have-omission or have-doubling in
a language – English – where the forms in question have gone largely
unreported over the centuries, or have tended to be discarded as
‘non-standard’ by prescriptive grammarians. At least one subtype of
supercompounds investigated here is reported for the first time in
this paper. Explanations for the attested patterns involve e.g.
prescriptivism, a universal tendency to avoid the (near-) adjacency
of identical grammatical structures, and the normative pressure to
ban several occurrences of have. In a comparison
with cognate structures in closely related languages, semantic
traits of these constructions are identified, e.g. irrealis
(have-omission), resultative, and experiential
(supercompounds). Nevertheless, a remainder of the examples are not
captured by these semantic descriptions, but possibly result from
functional overlap between modal and perfect constructions, or
“copying” of morphosyntactic features across constructions in a
discourse.
Article outline
- Introduction
- 1.
Have-less non-finite Perfect
constructions
- 2.From the modal pluperfect to supercompound perfects
- 3.Concluding remarks
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
References
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