The unaccusative hypothesis and the history of the perfect auxiliary in Germanic and Romance

Shannon, Thomas F.

doi:10.1075/cilt.66.32sha

Cited by 17 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Other verbs, whose arguments fit the 'undergoer' prototype less closely, are later integrated into the system in the course of grammaticalisation. The extension of possessive perfects to intransitive verbs (primarily those that do not closely fit the mutative type characteristic of the be perfects) is the source of the phenomenon of split intransitivity, the opposition between so-called unaccusative and unergative verbs among the intransitives (Shannon 1990). A possible further development is the subsequent loss of the be/have distinction and the unification of the perfect paradigm with a single auxiliary.…”

Section: Grammaticalisation Of Perfect Constructionsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…The original syntactic behaviour of the participle in many languages is determined by the fact that the resultant state is predicated of that participant of the action which is construed as bearing the results, the 'undergoer' (patient or theme) argument (Shannon 1990). Prototypical 'undergoers' are subjects of mutative intransitive verbs (verbs of change of state or location) on the one hand, and objects of transitive verbs on the other hand.…”

Section: Grammaticalisation Of Perfect Constructionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Hiberno-English medial-object perfects reconsidered

Pietsch

2009

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Perfects of the type I have my dinner eaten are a well-known feature of Irish English dialects. They can be linked to a functionally similar construction in Irish, of the type tá mo dhinneár ite agam (literally "is my dinner eaten at-me"), but also to earlier constructions in Standard English. The issue has sometimes been treated as a competition between two seemingly mutually exclusive explanations, a "substrate" and a "retentionist" hypothesis.This dichotomy can be overcome on the basis of a model of "contactinduced grammaticalisation" (Heine/Kuteva 2005): an existing source structure in the receiving language (English) expands along normal paths, but under a triggering effect of a contact language (Irish), ultimately leading to an apparent duplication of a foreign model.Empirical data comes from historical 18th/19th century corpus material. It provides evidence about the chronology and sociolinguistic setting in which the relevant changes took place. It supports a scenario where both Irish-English bilingualism and exposure to the English source constructions played crucial roles.

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Section: Grammaticalisation Of Perfect Constructionsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Grammaticalisation Of Perfect Constructionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hiberno-English medial-object perfects reconsidered

Pietsch

2009

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“…Note that this map glosses over some of the subtleties of auxiliary selection in the core be + have group: what it does not represent is the fact that auxiliary selection operates according to a gradient scale in these languages, conditioned by such semantic values as telicity, punctuality, agentivity, dynamicity, and mood (Shannon 1988(Shannon , 1990Arnett 1997;Sorace 2000;Bentley & Eythórsson 2003). The existence of this gradience does not, however, preclude areal spread as an explanation for its distribution: bilingual speakers who introduce structural innovations are aware, to the extent that they have a command of both the model and the replicating variety, of the semantic features which characterize and constrain the structure in the model variety, and these features can be replicated, just as more concrete entities can.…”

Section: The Charlemagne Sprachbundmentioning

confidence: 98%

Sources of auxiliation in the perfects of Europe

Drinka

2013

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This paper explores the complex role of language contact in the development of be and have auxiliation in the periphrastic perfects of Europe. Beginning with the influence of Ancient Greek on Latin, it traces the spread of the category across western Europe and identifies the Carolingian scribal tradition as largely responsible for extending the use of the be perfect alongside the have perfect across Charlemagne’s realm. Outside that territory, by contrast, in “peripheral” areas like Iberia, Southern Italy, and England, have came to be used as the only perfect auxiliary. Within the innovating core area, a further innovation began in Paris in the 12th century and spread to contiguous areas in France, Southern Germany, and northern Italy: the semantic shift in the perfects from anterior to preterital meaning. What can be concluded from these three successive instances of diffusion in the history of the perfect is that contact should be regarded as one of the essential “multiple sources” of innovation, and as a fundamental explanatory mechanism for language change.

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“…4 Naast deze semantisch-georiënteerde traditie, waarvan bijv. Shannon (1990) een meer recente exponent is, en waar onze benadering bij aansluit, bestaat er binnen de Relationele Grammatica en de Government and Binding-versie van de Generatieve Grammatica een syntactisch-georiënteerde benadering, waarbij het verschil tussen de twee subklassen van intransitieve werkwoorden niet in verband wordt gebracht met semantische verschillen in Aktionsart (zoals 'mutatief' versus 'immutatief'), maar met verschillen in de syntactische configuratie waarin de werkwoorden optreden (Perlmutters onaccusatief-hypothese). Vgl.…”

Section: 2unclassified

Het voltooid deelwoord in het Nederlands: beperkingen op het attributief gebruik

Elffers

Haan

Schermer

2014

Nederlandse Taalkunde

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Het voltooid deelwoord in het Nederlands. Beperkingen op het attributief gebruikElffers, E.H.C.; de Haan, S.; Schermer, I. General rightsIt is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulationsIf you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: http://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. AbstractAccording to current insights, attributive past participles (APPs) are impossible only with immutative intransitive verbs. Yet there appear to be APP restrictions with transitive and mutative intransitive verbs, but these restrictions are less absolute. In APP constructions, the attributive relationship implies that a PP, which presents the verbal meaning as a patient situation, forms a category together with a noun. In contrast with immutative intransitives, PPs of transitive and mutative intransitive verbs always embody a patient situation. The problem, then, is why some patient situations seem to be unsuitable to form a category with a noun. Below, we argue that, in these cases, the patient situation is insufficiently transparent or insufficiently relevant. The explanation of APP restrictions with mutatively used movement verbs lies in the agent role of the subject referent, which causes the immutative counterpart of these verbs to come into play.

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The unaccusative hypothesis and the history of the perfect auxiliary in Germanic and Romance

Cited by 17 publications

References 8 publications

Hiberno-English medial-object perfects reconsidered

Hiberno-English medial-object perfects reconsidered

Sources of auxiliation in the perfects of Europe

Het voltooid deelwoord in het Nederlands: beperkingen op het attributief gebruik

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