Re: The Perfect Tense versus the Preterite

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 1458
Date: 2000-02-10

 
----- Original Message -----
From: David James
To: cybalist@eGroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2000 11:33 PM
Subject: [cybalist] The Perfect Tense versus the Preterite

It appears that in certain western European languages the Preterite
tense has lost ground to the Perfect tense, at least in the spoken if
not the written language. 
A perfect example is French which only retains the Preterite in the
written form, although the Preterite was formerly used in speech. I
believe the same process is also happening in German and may have begun
in *European* Spanish as well; although *Latin-American* Spanish still
retains its traditional tense usage which largely corresponds to the
English usage of these tenses.
Can anyone offer any insight as to why the Perfect tense is now being
used in situations where the Preterite would have used formerly? Also
is this process found in any other languages, and is it a manifestation
of the mysterious Sprachbund phenomenon?
Incidentally, from my admitedly anglo-centric viewpoint, I would have
expected the trend to have been in the opposite direction, as the
Preterite would appear to be a more economical and concise method of
expressing the past.
I look forward to your replies, and corrections.
David.
Dear David,
 
Though grammars of English call the perfect a "tense", it is in fact an aspectual category. It is quite common for languages to reinterpret their aspectual distinction in temporal terms so that the perfective aspect of the present tense is redefined as the preterite tense. This is possible because the perfect "looks back" at events in the past though it actually refers to their results. The difference between the present perfect and the past simple in English is often analogous to that between indefinite and definite noun phrases:
 
There was a table in the middle of the room ... The table was black.
I've been there before ... It was a very brief visit.
 
There are also some well-known US/UK contrasts like 'I just saw John ~ I've just seen John'.
 
Somewhat ironically, what we call the preterite in Germanic is the PIE perfect in disguise, at any rate in the strong conjugation (write/wrote, sing/sang). The PIE preterites were lost in Proto-Germanic and the new past tense to replace them was based partly on the perfect paradigm.
 
The Latin "perfect" (the source of the French moribund preterite) combined the form of the PIE aorist and perfect, but became in fact an ordinary preterite (with only a few old perfects like odi 'I hate' or memini 'I remember' retaining their non-preterite temporal reference).
 
I don't think the "perfect > preterite" shift is a Sprachbund phenomenon, as it's by no means restricted to Western Europe. In my own language (Polish) the inherited Slavic preterites -- the aorist and the imperfective -- died out during the Middle Ages. As their use dwindled, a new preterite developed from the Slavic analytic perfect, consisting of an inflected form of the auxiliary BE plus a participle in *-l.
 
Slavic *esI znalU  or *znalU esI (literally [THOU] ART HAVING-KNOWN = 'you've known') yielded Old Polish jeś znał ~ znał jeś > Modern Polish znałeś ~ -(e)ś znał 'you knew (masculine sg.)'. The enclitic auxiliary has become a particle which can even now be detached from its verb, especially in colloquial Polish. Russian followed a similar trajectory, but there the auxiliary was simply dropped: the Russian counterpart of znałeś is ty (= 'thou') znal.
 
Piotr