Stephen Carlson wrote:The classic studies are those by Wackernagel and Chantraine:
Wackernagel, J., 1953[1904]. ‘Studien zum griechischen Perfectum’, Programm zur akademischen Preisverteilung, 3–32. Repr. in Kleine Schriften, 1000–21, Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht.
Chantraine, P., 1927. L’histoire du parfait grec. Paris: Champion.
Perhaps helpful is: Drinka, B., 1998. ‘The evolution of grammar. Evidence from Indo-European perfects’, in Monika Schmid (ed.), Historical Linguistics 1997, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 117–133.
Right. I've debated taking the time to work through translating these. The problem is (1) time and (2) how much I trust my ability to translate accurately.
Stephen Carlson wrote:K. Benstein has some articles on the perfect in a recent issue of the Transactions of the Philological Society (from which I got these cites).
Sara Kimball has a discussion and a complicated proposal: Kimball, Sara E. (1991). ‘The origin of the Greek k-perfect’. Glotta, 69: 141–53.
I'll take a look at those. Or, I should say, I'll check to see if I have access to though...
Stephen Carlson wrote:The kappa-formation appears to be a Greek development, while the reduplication may be late PIE.
Yeah, I knew that much. I'm wondering specifically about theories as their grammatical source. For example, reduplication may be motivated cognitively by various factors (common cross-linguistic examples are iterativity and intensive usage), but stativity isn't one of them, which makes the perfect look a little odd, since it was the PIE stative aspect (vs. eventive). One guess I have is that the reduplication was adapted from the athematic imperfectives (which would then fits Bhat's idea [followed by Buth & Runge] about perfects as being a combination of both perfective and imperfective). Likewise, if the kappa is borrowed from the aorist, well, then, that fits nicely. The connection between the form and the perfective and imperfective might just be wishful thinking, but it might be worth digging into if there's a clear answer one way or the other.