Scott Schwenter & Rena Torres Cacoullos
The Ohio State University & University of New Mexico
Defaults and indeterminacy in temporal grammaticalization
A typical grammaticalization change, perfects (anteriors) become pasts or perfectives via generalization of meaning, as the specification of “current relevance” bleaches (e.g., Bybee et al. 1994:86). Germanic and Romance show various stages of the ‘have’/‘be’ + Past Participle construction, with some varieties instantiating perfect uses (e.g., English, Spanish) and others generalization to perfective or past (e.g., French, German). The Spanish Present Perfect displays both developmental stages: in Mexican Spanish varieties it is a perfect of persisting situation in Comrie’s (1976) terms, denoting a past situation ongoing in the present, as in (1), while in Peninsular (= Spain) varieties it is a hodiernal perfective, displacing the Preterit in past situations occurring over the today of speech time, as in (2) (Harris 1982, Moreno de Alba 2006, Schwenter 1994a).
(1) Lo HA ATENDIDO, y lo sigue atendiendo (México, Habla popular, 346)
‘He (the doctor) HAS TREATED (PP) him and he continues treating him’
(2) Lo ESCUCHÉ (PRET) esta mañana, lo HE ESCUCHADO (PP) esta mañana (COREC, CCON028A)
‘I HEARD (PRET) it this morning, I HEARD (PP) it this morning’
In this study, we provide a quantitative characterization of the notion of default through the analysis of variation between the Spanish Present Perfect (PP) and Preterit (PRET). Multivariate analysis of over 4,000 tokens in which we consider contexts (factor groups) such as temporal distance, clause type, aktionsart, information status of object, shows the default perfective variant to be the Preterit in Mexican, the PP in Peninsular Spanish. Thus, the default form is the one that is favored to occur in the most frequent contexts (e.g., main affirmative vs. other clause types) and least specified contexts (e.g. no co-occurring temporal adverbial).
The comparison of the linguistic conditioning of variation, that is, the environments where particular variants are most favored, in Peninsular vs. Mexican Spanish synchronically allows us to tackle a crucial question about diachronic change: How does a form such as the Spanish PP become the default past perfective? It has been assumed that the perfect > perfective change proceeds gradually to situations more and more temporally remote from utterance time (Bybee et al. 1994; Dahl 1984, 1985; Schwenter 1994a, b). In considering temporal distance as a factor group, we distinguish today (2) from before today past situations (3), but also past situations for which temporal location is irrelevant (4) and those whose temporal reference is indeterminate (5).
(3) Before today
y ayer FUIMOS (PRET) Maripi y yo (COREC, BCON014B)
‘and yesterday we WENT (PRET) Maripi and I’
(4) Irrelevant
Hay gente que se muere con noventa años y nunca HA MADURADO (PP) (COREC, BCON014D)
‘There are people who die at ninety years old and they never HAVE MATURED (PP)’
(5) Indeterminate (analyst, possibly interlocutor, can’t tell)
y ahora le HE COMPRADO (PP) a mi nieto uno. (COREC, CCON004C)
‘and now I HAVE BOUGHT (PP) one for my grandson’
The results of our analysis show that, rather than strictly via temporal generalization into the past, the route of the PP’s shift to perfective advances most clearly in Indeterminate (temporally non-specific) past contexts like that in (5).
References
Bybee, J. with Perkins, R. and Pagliuca, W. 1994. The evolution of grammar: The grammaticalization of tense, aspect and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dahl, Östen. 1984. Temporal distance: remoteness distinctions in tense-aspect systems. In Butterworth, Brian, Comrie, Bernard, Dahl, Östen (eds.) Explanations for Language Universals. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Dahl, Östen. 1985. Tense and aspect systems. Oxford: Blackwell.
Harris, Martin. 1982. The “past simple” and “present perfect” in Romance. In Harris, Martin and Vincent, Nigel (eds). Studies in the Romance verb, 42-70. London: Croom Helm.
Moreno de Alba, José. 1978. Valores de los tiempos pasados del indicativo y su evolución. In Company Company, Concepción (ed.) Sintaxis histórica de la lengua española, Primera parte: La frase verbal, 3-92. México: FCE & UNAM.
Schwenter, Scott A. 1994a. The grammaticalization of an anterior in progress: evidence from a peninsular Spanish dialect. Studies in Language 18: 71-111.
Schwenter, Scott A. 1994b. “Hot news” and the grammaticalization of perfects. Linguistics 32: 995-1028.
