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Toward a Cognitive Explanation of Perfect Auxiliary Variation: Some Modal and Aspectual Effects in the History of Germanic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Thomas F. Shannon
Thomas F. Shannon
Affiliation:
Department of GermanUniversity of CaliforniaBerkeley, CA 94720–3243 [tshannon@garnet.berkeley.edu]
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Extract

This paper introduces a cognitive framework for perfect auxiliary selection (HAVE versus BE) in Germanic based on transitive (HAVE) and mutative (BE) prototypes as affected by lexical aspect and transitivity parameters (Hopper and Thompson 1980). The phenomenon of “HAVE-switch” is exemplified in the history of several Germanic languages. Here numerous modal and aspectual factors shift the perfect auxiliary with mutatives from the customary BE to HAVE. This shift is then explained in terms of the proposed model. The contexts in question are all seen to reduce the mutativity of a clause (the effective attainment of the resultant state in the patient subject) and hence the motivation for using BE. Several direct parallels between HAVE-switch in Germanic and aspectual usage in Russian are discussed and their motivation in terms of this approach shown.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , Fall 1995 , pp. 129 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Germanic Linguistics 1995

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