Re: [tied] Stative Verbs, or Perfect Tense

On 05-02-26 00:45, Miguel Carrasquer wrote:

> It seems to be the case that verbal forms expressing state
> are inherently likely to become past tenses. That is borne
> out by the Germanic and Romance composite perfects ("I have
> the book read" / "Habeo librum lectum" => "I've read the
> book" / "He leido el libro"), which we know made the
> transition from "stative" to "past" in recent history (the
> same phenomenon in Hittite with the hark-perfect). This is
> not just an IE thing: the Proto-Semitic stative (still a
> real stative in Akkadian) has become a perfective past in
> e.g. Hebrew and Arabic.

Within IE, we also have the Slavic periphrastic neo-perfect with forms
of 'to be' plus the l-participle. It has completely ousted the old past
tenses in most of Slavic, becoming the only kind of preterite. The shift
has taken place independently in so many different languages that it
must be a natural evolutionary trajectory.

Piotr

Piotr