Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T14:33:22.194Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Tracking the constraints on a grammaticalizing perfect(ive)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2011

Mary T. Copple
Mary T. Copple
Affiliation:
Kansas State University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Perfect grammaticalization has been much researched across languages (Bybee, Perkins, & Pagliuca, 1994; Harris, 1982, among others), however, debate continues about the role of continuative and experiential perfects (e.g., Stage II of the proposed path) and how extension to perfective contexts occurs (Schwenter, 1994a, 1994b; Schwenter & Torres Cacoullos, 2008; Squartini & Bertinetto, 1995, 2000). This study examines data from three centuries of Peninsular Spanish dramatic texts in order to track the linguistic factors constraining Present Perfect (PP)-Preterit variation. In the 15th century, the PP was employed in very recent temporal reference contexts, where it had developed a “hot news” function. Use in nonspecified (irrelevant and indeterminate) temporal reference was concentrated in semantic classes associated with resultative use. With time, the PP extended to all semantic classes in irrelevant temporal reference while simultaneously strengthening in perfective, but temporally indeterminate contexts, and finally, hodiernal contexts. Nonspecified temporal reference is believed to play a special role in the PP's grammaticalization: the irrelevant temporal PP function helps to solidify the event focus introduced by the hot news perfect, whereas its use in indeterminate contexts strengthens associations with perfectivity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , July 2011 , pp. 163 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

CORPUS12

Ávila, Gaspar de. (1632). La boca y no el corazón.Google Scholar
Bretón de los Herreros, Manuel. (1828). A Madrid me vuelvo.Google Scholar
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro. (1623). Amor, honor y poder.Google Scholar
Carnerero, José María de. (1831). El afán de figurar.Google Scholar
Castro, Guillén de. (1596–1601). El amor constante.Google Scholar
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. (1615). La casa de los celos y las selvas de Ardenia.Google Scholar
Fernández de Moratín, Leandro. (1806). El sí de las niñas.Google Scholar
Larra, Mariano José. (1830–1839). Los inseparables.Google Scholar
Lope de Vega, Félix. (1613–1620). La vengadora de las mujeres.Google Scholar
Martínez de la Rosa, Francisco. (1849). Amor de padre.Google Scholar
Molina, Tirso de (Téllez, Gabriel). (1612). La villana de Sagra.Google Scholar
Rivas, Duque de (Saavedra, Angel de). (1835). Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino.Google Scholar
Rojas, Fernando de. (1499). La celestina.Google Scholar
Ruiz de Alarcón y Mendoza, Juan. (1634). La amistad castigada.Google Scholar

REFERENCES

Burgo, Clara. (2008). Tense and aspect grammaticalization in Bilbao Spanish. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan, Perkins, Revere, & Pagliuca, William. (1994). The evolution of grammar: The grammaticalization of tense, aspect and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Carey, Kathleen. (1995). Subjectification and the development of the English perfect. In Stein, D. & Wright, S. (eds.), Subjectivity and subjectivisation: Linguistic perspectives. New York: Cambridge University Press. 83–102.Google Scholar
Carey, Kathleen. (1996). From resultativity to current relevance: Evidence from the history of English and Modern Castilian Spanish. In Goldberg, A. E. (ed.), Conceptual structure, discourse and language. Stanford: CSLI Publications. 31–48.Google Scholar
Chandler, Richard E., & Schwartz, Kessel. (1991). A new history of Spanish literature. Rev. ed. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Company Company, Concepción. (1980). Formalización del paradigma verbal compuesto en siete textos de la Edad Media. Undergraduate Thesis, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard. (1976). Aspect: An introduction to verbal aspect and related problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University.Google Scholar
Copple, Mary T. (2009). A diachronic study of the Spanish perfect(ive): Tracking the constraints on a grammaticalizing construction. Ph.D. dissertation, University of New Mexico.Google Scholar
Cortés-Torres, M. (2005). La perífrasis estar +-ndo en el español puertorriqueño: ¿Variación dialectal o contacto lingüístico? Ph.D. dissertation, University of New Mexico.Google Scholar
Dahl, Östen. (1985). Tense and aspect systems. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Davidson, Brad. (1996). ‘Pragmatic weight' and Spanish subject pronouns: The pragmatic and discourse uses of ‘tú’ and ‘yo’ in spoken Madrid Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics 26:543–565.Google Scholar
De Miguel, Elena. (1999). El aspecto léxico. In Bosque, I. & Demonte, V. (eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua español. Madrid: Espasa. 2977–3060.Google Scholar
Detges, Ulrich. (2006). Aspect and pragmatics. The passé composé in Old French and the Old Spanish perfecto compuesto. In Eksell, K. & Vinther, T. (eds.), Change in verbal systems. Issues on explanation. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Publishing. 47–72.Google Scholar
Dixon, Victor. (2004). Lope Félix de Vega Carpio. In Gie, D. T. (ed.), The Cambridge history of Spanish literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 251–265.Google Scholar
Martín, García, María., José (2001). La formación de los tiempos compuestos del verbo en español medieval y clásico. Valencia: Universitat de Valencia.Google Scholar
Harris, Martin. (1982). The ‘past simple’ and ‘present perfect’ in Romance. In Harris, M. & Vincent, N. (eds.), Studies in the Romance verb. London: Croom Helm. 42–70.Google Scholar
Harvie, Dawn. 1998. Null subject in English: Wonder if it exists? Cahiers Linguistics d'Ottawa 26:15–25.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. (1999). Why is grammaticalization irreversible? Linguistics 37:1043–1068.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hernández, José Estebán. (2004). Present perfect variation and grammaticization in Salvadoran Spanish. Ph.D. dissertation, Univeristy of New Mexico.Google Scholar
Howe, Chad. (2006). Cross-dialectal features of the Spanish present perfect: A typological analysis of form and function. Ph.D. dissertation, The Ohio State University.Google Scholar
Jacob, Daniel. (1996). Von der subjekt-relevanz zur Gegenwartsrelevanz: Gebrauch und entwicklung der perfectperiphrase aver + partizip perfekt passiv im altspanischen. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 46:251–286.Google Scholar
Kempas, Ilpo. 2006. Estudio sobre el uso del pretérito perfecto prehodiernal en el español peninsular y en comparación con la variedad del español argentino hablada en Santiago del Estero. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Helsinki.Google Scholar
Kempas, Ilpo. 2008. La elección de los tiempos verbales aorísticos en contextos hodiernales: Sinopsis de datos empíricos recogidos en la España peninsular. In I. Olza Moreno, M. Casado Velarde, & R. González Ruiz (eds.), Actas del XXXVII Simposio Internacional de la Sociedad Española de Lingüística (SEL). Departamento de Lingüística hispánica y Lenguas modernas. Pamplona: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra. 397–408. Also available at: http://www.unav.es/linguis/simposiosel/actas/.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana. (2006). Linguistic change: Gradual or abrupt? An empirical characterization of the transition period. Paper presented at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana, & Malvar, Elisabete. (2007). Elucidating the transition period in linguistic change: The expression of the future in Brazilian Portuguese. Probus 19:11–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana, & Tagliamonte, Sali. (2001). African American English in the diaspora. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Rodríguez Louro, Celeste. (2009). Perfect evolution and change: A sociolinguistic study of Preterit and Present Perfect usage in contemporary and earlier Argentina. Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Melbourne.Google Scholar
Sankoff, David. (1988). Sociolinguistics and syntactic variation. In Newmeyer, F. J. (ed.), Linguistics, the Cambridge survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 140–161.Google Scholar
Sankoff, David, Tagliamonte, Sali A., & Smith, Eric. (2005). Goldvarb X: A multivariate analysis application for Macintosh and Windows. Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto, and Department of Mathematics, University of Ottawa. Available at: http://individual.utoronto.ca/tagliamonte/Goldvarb/GV_index.htm.Google Scholar
Schwenter, Scott A. (1994a). “Hot news” and the grammaticalization of perfects. Linguistics 32:995–1028.Google Scholar
Schwenter, Scott A. (1994b). The grammaticalization of an anterior in progress: Evidence from a Peninsular Spanish dialect. Studies in Language 18:71–111.Google Scholar
Schwenter, Scott A., & Torres Cacoullos, Rena. (2008). Defaults and indeterminacy in temporal grammaticalization: The ‘perfect’ road to perfective. Language Variation and Change 20:1–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Serrano, María José. (1994). Del pretérito indefinido al pretérito perfecto: Un caso de cambio y gramaticalización en el español de Canarias y Madrid. Linguística española actual 16:37–57.Google Scholar
Serrano, María José. (1996). Accounting for morpho-syntactic change in Spanish: The present perfect case. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 3:51–61.Google Scholar
Squartini, Mario, & Bertinetto, Pier Marco. (1995). The simple and compound past in romance languages. Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica 9:219–240.Google Scholar
Squartini, Mario, & Bertinetto, Pier Marco. (2000). The simple and compound past in Romance languages. In Dahl, Ö. (ed.), Tense and aspect in the languages of Europe. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 403–439.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. (2006). Analysing sociolinguistic variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thibault, André. (2000). Perfecto simple y perfecto compuesto en español preclásico. Tübingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, Rena. (2001). From lexical to grammatical to social meaning. Language in Society 30:443–478.Google Scholar
Van Herk, Gerard. (2003). In perfect shape: Verb semantics in the history of the English Present Perfect. Paper presented at the New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference (NWAV 32), October 2003. University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Vendler, Zeno. (1967). Verbs and times. In Vendler, Z. (ed.), Linguistics and philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 97–121.Google Scholar