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Article published In: Languages in Contrast
Vol. 25:1 (2025) ► pp.1–22

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Intermediate perfects

A comparison of Dutch, Catalan and Breton

 | Université Paris III – Nouvelle Sorbonne, France
 | Utrecht University, the Netherlands
 | Escuela Oficial de Idiomas, Spain
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Utrecht University. Henriëtte de Swart gratefully acknowledges the financial support by NWO (##360-80-070) for the project ‘Time in Translation’.

Published online: 22 September 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.22008.cor
Abstract
The cross-linguistic variation in distribution and meaning of perfect constructions building on have + past participle in Western European languages has been analysed in terms of the aoristic drift, the shift from resultative via perfect to perfective past meaning that takes us from ‘classical’ perfect languages like English to ‘liberal’ perfect languages like French. This paper challenges the (often implicit) assumption that there is a single path along the aoristic drift, resulting in a linear perfect scale. Data coming from translation corpora reveal that the perfect in three ‘intermediate’ languages (Dutch, Catalan and Breton) is sensitive to lexical aspect (state vs. event), narrativity and hodiernal vs. pre-hodiernal past time reference. These meaning ingredients appear in different combinations in the three languages, thereby establishing them as independent dimensions of variation. The conclusion that there are multiple paths along the aoristic drift has implications for the cross-linguistic semantics of tense and aspect.
Article outline
  • 1.The perfect in contrast
    • 1.1perfect variations
    • 1.2Distributional patterns emerging from translations
    • 1.3Linguistic ingredients driving the perfect scale
  • 2.The Dutch, Catalan and Breton perfects
    • 2.1Dutch in the tense-aspect system of the Germanic languages
    • 2.2Catalan in the tense-aspect system of the Romance languages
    • 2.3The tense-aspect system of Breton
    • 2.4Towards a comparison
  • 3.Catalan, Breton and Dutch as intermediate perfect languages
    • 3.1Distributional patterns: A quantitative analysis of the Camus dataset
    • 3.2The intermediate position of the Dutch present perfect
    • 3.3The Catalan present perfect in comparison to Dutch
    • 3.4The Breton present and past perfect in comparison to Dutch and Catalan
  • 4.Implications of cross-linguistic distribution for linguistic theory
  • Notes
  • References
  • Secondary references
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