Intermediate perfects: A comparison of Dutch, Catalan and Breton

Abstract

The cross-linguistic variation in distribution and meaning of PERFECT constructions building on HAVE + past participle in Western European languages has been analysed in terms of the aoristic drift, the shift from resultative via perfect to perfective past meaning that takes us from ‘classical’ PERFECT languages like English to ‘liberal’ PERFECT languages like French. This paper challenges the (often implicit) assumption that there is a single path along the aoristic drift, resulting in a linear PERFECT scale. Data coming from translation corpora reveal that the PERFECT in three ‘intermediate’ languages (Dutch, Catalan and Breton) is sensitive to lexical aspect (state vs. event), narrativity and hodiernal vs. pre-hodiernal past time reference. These meaning ingredients appear in different combinations in the three languages, thereby establishing them as independent dimensions of variation. The conclusion that there are multiple paths along the aoristic drift has implications for the cross-linguistic semantics of tense and aspect.