Indo-European perfects in typological perspective

Östen Dahl | Stockholm University

This chapter looks at Indo-European perfects in the light of recent typological research on TAME (tense-aspect-mood-evidentiality), in particular the work done at the Department of Linguistics at Stockholm University with the help of massive parallel corpora. The chapter starts with a survey of data sources and methods for multilingual linguistic research. Parameters of variation among perfects, both within Indo-European and elsewhere, are discussed: negated experiential uses, universal uses, combinations with definite time adverbials and words like ‘just’. Incipient grammaticalization of words for ‘already’ in the Indo-European languages is also considered.

Keywords: perfects, iamitives, multilingual research, parallel corpora, Indo-European

Published online: 23 September 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.352.19dah

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