Cagliari, Italy  15-18 September 2003

ALT V Conference

Timur Maisak

Auxiliary verbs as perfectivizing devices.
timik@isabase.philol.msu.ru,
tm@pochtamt.ru

 

As works by Oesten Dahl and Joan Bybee have shown, perfective is one of the most important gram-types found in the world's languages, and cross-linguistically there are two main trends in the organization of perfective/imperfective distinction. According to the first, and the most frequent one, perfective past is opposed to imperfective (past and non-past) in a so-called "tripartite" tense-aspect system, where purely inflectional marking is used and the meaning of perfective aspect is quite well captured by the canonical Comrie's characterization - the situation is viewed within its temporal boundaries as a whole (the perfective of "the total view of the situation"). According to the second, which is more rare, perfective forms are marked by the special "perfectivizing" morphemes, derivational in nature (like prefixes in Russian or Georgian, or suffixes in Margi), and here perfective forms emphasize the presence of a limit or end-state of a process, the aspectual distinction being almost or partly independent of the temporal one (a so-called "Slavic-style aspect").

     Perfectivizing affixes imply a definite limiting point of a process, making the process denoted by the verb "bounded" (telic) – this being the reason why such morphemes were called "bounders" by Bybee & Dahl. I will show that "bonder perfectivization" is a more wide-spread phenomenon, as it is presented in many languages of the world with its variety, where it is not affixes but auxiliary verbs that play the role of "bounders". Examples include constructions (of different formal status: periphrastic forms, serial verbs or "complex verbs") in the languages of Asia, viz. Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic, Daic, Turkic and probably some others. In these languages, the following picture (with some cross-linguistic differences) is observed: (1) Auxiliary verbs are widely used, and among them a certain set of auxiliaries performs a function of pointing at a particular result, or a turning-point, a moment of change in the development of the situation. (2) The number of auxiliaries used as "bounders" varies from 4-5 up to 15 and more (in one language), and the same range of lexical sources for these auxiliaries is usually found - like verbs of motion and causative verbs of change in location (e.g. GO, COME, ENTER, GO OUT, RISE, DESCEND, FALL, GIVE, TAKE, THROW, PUT, PLACE, SIT DOWN, LEAVE, REACH, PASS, PUSH, SEND, STAY and some others).

    Such, so to say, "auxiliary bounders" in different languages share many interesting properties to be discussed at the presentation (they also share a number of important properties with "affixal bounders"). Thus, they are clearly not fully grammaticalized markers: traces of their original lexical meaning display themselves in the presence of "additional meanings" and co-occurence restrictions with content verbs. (Auxiliaries in this respect also play a role of derivational markers, as the co-occurence of auxiliaries and content verbs is very idiosyncratic, and generally not predictable.) However, a tendency towards further grammaticalization is seen in some cases: e.g. some auxiliaries may become more frequent and more easily combining with different sorts of content verbs; construction with "perfectivizing auxiliary" may cease to be compatible with imperfective grams (like the present tense), and so on. At the early stages, "bounders" as a whole - and especially auxiliaries as "bounders" - can be hardly said to be grammaticalized *aspectual* markers; their function of pointing at the existence of a limit (and specifying a particular type of a limit) operates at the level of *actionality* rather than aspect proper - so, they are rather means of "telicization" than "perfectivization".

    To conclude, each "bounder" (be it an auxiliary or an affix) points at a particular type of result of a situation (usually this result is described in the terms of a change of spatial configuration between the participants in the course of a process). Thus "bounders" can be said to classify different situations (resp. different content verbs) from the point of view of their possible resultant stages (notice that there seem to be no comparably rich systems of classificatory "imperfectivizing", or "detelicizing" devices).