The Greek Perfect with Verbs of Speech

Stephen Carlson
Posts: 3351
Joined: May 11th, 2011, 10:51 am
Location: Melbourne
Contact:

Re: The Greek Perfect with Verbs of Speech

Post by Stephen Carlson »

MAubrey wrote:
Stephen Carlson wrote:Yeah, I think we're in agreement that the bulk of the ancient Greek perfects are resultative. Where we are disagreement for the moment is how to characterize the rump. Perhaps we're both fishing for the right characterization, but I'm saying "anterior" and you're saying "completive." (By the way, BPP have another development, from resultative to "evidential." Have you considered that?)
There's nothing particularly evidential about Greek's perfect.
BPP make a distinction between evidential and inferential, which the WALS page does not. I don't think the Greek perfect is inferential.
MAubrey wrote:
Stephen Carlson wrote:Yes, my working hypothesis is that we are seeing a limited movement of the Greek perfect into the anterior with situations that are irresultative "cycles" (i.e, bounded states or activities), or have a result state that has not persisted to the temporal frame of reference (which can be a telic event reinterpreted as a cycle). Why do I chose anterior for these cases? For me, it is because (1) the semantics work fine,
I'm yet to have found a discussion of anteriors as involving telicity restrictions for dynamic predicates. That's my beef: the semantics don't work fine. I never even gave "completive" a thought until *after* I began seeing that. In fact, I had simply skimmed over the completive discussion entirely before that point. I had simply assumed resultative to anterior. And I'm inclined to wonder if that's what most people have been doing.
OK. The word "restrictions" suggests a distributional argument, not a semantic one. And for the distribution argument to work, we need to nail down what you mean by "telicity restrictions" and compare them to languages with similar restrictions, such as German. As for the semantics (rather than distribution) of anteriors not fitting, I have not seen an argument that anterior don't work in any particular case where the resultative is not available. In fact, I'd be surprised to find one, since anteriors tend to arise from a semantic bleaching of resultatives, which is probably why most scholars go that way.
MAubrey wrote:
Stephen Carlson wrote:(2) it is in the path of evolution of these grams, and
This is true. This is the strongest point and one I keep coming back to.
Yep. Easy to get there by well-attested forms of semantic bleaching.
MAubrey wrote:
Stephen Carlson wrote:(3) several scholars (many of whom are not native English speakers) have argued for this with examples I've found compelling.
They are non-native speakers, yes, but first, as far as I'm aware, they all speak languages that have the very same areal feature of a possessive perfect as English and secondly, they're all relying what I would view as a highly problematic tradition cognitively and methodologically. I'd be more interested if there were people writing about Ancient Greek whose native language was Welsh or Russian--languages whose verbal systems has rejected the possessive future despite its areal dominance because of linguistic compatibility.
Sure, see the article by the native-Russian speaking Perel'muter in the book The Typology of Resultative Constructions on the Homeric Greek perfect. He has examples of anterior (under the term "actional perfect").

At any rate, it the kind of charge that's hard to make without someone thinking that is an ad hominem argument.
MAubrey wrote:
Stephen Carlson wrote:For completives, my problems are (1) the semantics seem to need a metaphorical extension,
That's a very odd objection to my eyes...semantics *is* metaphoric extension. I'm wondering how you expect a resultative to turn into a anterior without metaphor. Analogy, generalization, bleaching, those are all types of metaphor.
Of course, that's how semantic extension works. The question is whether it is you or Greek speakers that are extending the completive prototype as set forth in BPP (as I understand it).
MAubrey wrote:
Stephen Carlson wrote:(2) on the grammaticalization cline, it is swimming upstream, and
Which cline are you talking about? The one on BPP, 105, that fails to account for those langauges that have both a resultative and a completive meaning? (I'll have access to grammars on Nakanai and Buriat soon, btw, and I just noticed on Table 3.5 that Tucano has both resultative and completive usages, too). That particular chart isn't based on all their data. It's based on a subset of languages that are thoroughly documented in their history. Its useful
MAubrey wrote:I should add that the diagram on page 105 of BPP is by no means complete in any case. There's no mention of anteriors developing on their own from possessive predicates either. It isn't that completive-resultative semantics together violates the unidirectionality hypothesis, but that as it stands, the unidirectionality hypothesis makes so claims whatsoever about the relationships between completives and resultatives.
There's a way to get around the unidirectionality hypothesis by a layering argument. It's a lot of work though, and I have my doubts that it can be made to work for Greek where the source of its resultative perfect is a stative construction in PIE and the "completive" has the same morphology.
MAubrey wrote:
Stephen Carlson wrote:(3) it is exotic.
The problem is that if you want one thing to be exotic, then really, just about any linguistic feature can be considered exotic. Is it a numbers thing? How many languages would BPP need to list over their 35 to make the category non-exotic? Or is it because it isn't a standard term? If you look at the tables beginning of page 295 of BPP, you'll see that most completives aren't called completives in any case from Past, to Perfective, to Perfective, Emphatic Particle, Emotive are all labels used for what BPP call completives.
It's a couple of things. First, the concept is not well-understood (Dahl doesn't even have it). Second, the languages that have it are poorly understood. Third, it's not an areal or genetic feature near Greek. These aren't fatal problems, but it kind of gets into area that extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence.
MAubrey wrote:All in all, if those are your problems, I think we're doing pretty well.

But there's a lot here. Maybe we can pick one or two pieces and work through that instead of doing everything at once. I think we're going to get lost in this thread otherwise.
I've broken up the responses. But the key part is nailing down the distributional argument. Every time you've described the distribution, I've misunderstood it. The key concepts need to be nailed down, including "telicity," sorry (is it change of state, boundedness, closed topologically, something else?). Also, it needs to be made clear that the distribution you've found is unexpected or problematic for anteriors. Lots of languages with anteriors have lots of strange restrictions on their use. English has lifetime effects, for example, but other languages do not. English can use the perfect for "I've been reading this book for an hour," but many other European languages do not, preferring the present.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Post Reply

Return to “Syntax and Grammar”