When (not) to establish a new category. The case of perfect, ‘already’, and iamitives
Ana Krajinovic, Jozina Vander Klok, Kilu von Prince
March 2023
 

In this paper, we analyze the semantic space of perfect and ‘already’, and challenge the necessity of assuming the existence of the newly proposed category of iamitives (Olsson, 2013), which is said to have a core meaning of change of state, similarly to ‘already’, with an additional resultative meaning making it also similar to the perfect aspect. We investigate several perfect/iamitive/‘already’ markers in Nafsan, Toqabaqita, Unua, Javanese, and Mandarin Chinese. We argue that characteristics that have been taken as evidence to necessarily posit iamitives, including the availability of the change-of-state meaning or the lack of the experiential function, can be explained by the interaction between the perfect/‘already’ and the following language-internal mechanisms: (a) aspectual coercion in languages with underspecified verbal aspect can explain the presence of the change-of-state meaning with perfect aspect; (b) paradigmatic blocking can explain the lack of some perfect functions of a given marker in a language; and (c) compatibility in meaning can explain certain overlaps between perfect and ‘already’. This approach of identifying fine-grained meanings can also facilitate large-scale typological comparisons, as the distribution of these fine-grained meanings can be systematically tested for correlation with other language-internal mechanisms.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/007206
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: in revision
keywords: aspect, perfect, already, iamitive, linguistic category, austronesian, oceanic, semantics
Downloaded:438 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]