This volume gathers nine contributions dealing with Aorists and Perfects. Drinka challenges the notion of Aoristic Drift in Romance languages. Walker considers two emergent uses of the Perfect in British English. Jara seeks to determine the constraints on tense choice within narrative discourse in Peruvian Spanish. Henderson argues for a theory based on Langacker’s ‘sequential scanning’ in Chilean and Uruguayan Spanish. Delmas looks at ’Ua in Tahitian, a polysemic particle with a range of aspectual and modal meanings. Bourdin addresses the expression of anteriority with just in English. Yerastov examines the distribution of the transitive be Perfect in Canadian English. Fryd offers a panchronic study of have-less perfect constructions in English. Eide investigates counterfactual present perfects in Mainland Scandinavian dialects.

This book analyzes the existence of the three nuances of the perfect tense occurring in the Greek New Testament: resultative-stative, anterior (current relevance), and simple past. The ancient Greek perfect expresses a resultative-stative nuance, with intransitivity dominant. Some of these archaic perfects survived up to the Koine period and appear in the Greek New Testament. In Classical Greek, the perfect went through a transition from resultative to anterior (current relevance) with increasing transitivity. In the Koine period, the Greek perfect shows another semantic change from the anterior to simple past. In the end, the perfect merged with the aorist, ending up in decay. It disappeared until the modern Greek development of a perfect forming using the auxiliary ἔχω.

Publisher Description

In Grammaticalising the Perfect and Explanations of Language Change: Have- and Be-Perfects in the History and Structure of English and Bulgarian, Bozhil Hristov investigates key aspects of the verbal systems of two distantly related Indo-European languages, highlighting similarities as well as crucial differences between them and seeking a unified approach. The book reassesses some long-held notions and functionalist assumptions and shines the spotlight on certain areas that have received less attention, such as the role of ambiguity in actual usage. The detailed analysis of rich, contextualised material from a selection of texts dovetails with large-scale corpus studies, complementing their findings and enhancing our understanding of the phenomena. This monograph thus presents a happy marriage of traditional philological techniques and recent advances in theoretical linguistics and corpus work.

This book traces the evolution of the Indo-European verbal system from the early proto-language to the period of the first Greek texts.

Includes Greek text and literal interlinear English translation of the New Testament.