Typological comparison and linguistic areas: some introductory remarks

The development of the universal perfect in Arabic

“…1 I hypothesize that the emergence of the universal perfect construction in Arabic is the result of a grammaticalization, akin to what are in the literature referred to as possessive perfect constructions (Heine & Kuteva 2006), that is, perfect-expressing constructions that have been grammaticalized out of a possessive construction. In this case, though, the historical base is a preposition, in contrast to the well-known grammaticalization of constructions expressing tense and aspect from possessive verbs in Romance and Germanic languages (Meillet 1923, Trask 1979, Vincent 1982, Pinkster 1987, Bybee & Dahl 1989, Dahl 1996, Haspelmath 1998, Ramat 1998, Drinka 2003. Such a developmental trajectory has never before been attested in the context of Semitic.…”

“…This is widely acknowledged in the literature (Traugott & Heine 1991 (and references therein), Heine 1993, Bybee et al 1994, Lehmann 1995, Heine & Kuteva 2002, 2005, 2006, Hopper & Traugott 2003, Heine & Nomachi 2010. More broadly, much work on grammaticalization has specifically focused on the grammaticalization and development of constructions expressing tense and aspect that involve the auxiliary 'have' (Meillet 1923, Trask 1979, Vincent 1982, Pinkster 1987, Bybee & Dahl 1989, Dahl 1996, Haspelmath 1998, Ramat 1998, Drinka 2003. Coining the term 'possessive perfect', Heine and Kuteva (2006) make reference to perfect-expressing constructions that have come about as a consequence of the grammaticalization of a possessive schema.…”

“…This literature maintains that the grammaticalization of a possessive perfect is typologically rare beyond Indo-European, and among Indo-European languages is largely restricted to languages spoken in Europe. As a result, this grammaticalization has emerged as a defining characteristic of Europe as a linguistic area (Dahl 1996, Haspelmath 1998, Ramat 1998. Most of the research has been on Romance and Germanic, which are languages with a 'have' possessive predicate in their lexicon, that is, languages that build their possessive construction on the basis of a transitive Action schema, notated 'X takes Y' > 'X has, owns Y' (i.e.…”

English as a bridge: An L3-approach to contrastive linguistics

“…This has been shown by recent typological enterprises to be one of the main factors shared by most languages in Europe, as witnessed by the debate around Wharf 's old idea of a Standard Average European (SAE) and the so-called Charlemagne-Sprachbund consisting of one or more centres surrounded by several possible peripheries (cf. Ramat 1998;Haspelmath 2001). In this way, single linguistic aspects traditionally considered in a separate manner can be shown to be crucially conjoined by areal features.…”

Remotivating inflectional classes

“…Gaeta, 2018 for a detailed discussion on the role played by Italian as contact language): While the come-passive is widespread throughout the whole Alpine area (cf. Wiesinger, 1989;Ramat, 1998;Wiemer, 2011), the go-passive is a particular development of (some of) the Walser German dialects. Actually, the go-passive is also used in the present, typically with a strong modal (deontic) value as shown in the following example:…”