Chapter 2

“Universal” readings of perfects and iamitives in typological perspective

In Dahl & Wälchli (2016), we investigate the relationship between perfects and iamitives – i.e. items whose semantics combines features of perfects and words like already – using statistical techniques on data from a multilingual parallel corpus of Bible texts. This paper looks at the same grammatical domain with focus on so-called “universal readings” of perfects, several different subtypes are identified and the cross-linguistic variation of the distribution of perfects and iamitives as well as other kinds of marking within them is studied. The types looked at are combinations with adverbs labeled as duration-quantifying (for three hours), left-boundary indicating (since Monday), and universally quantifying adverbials (always). An overt marking may be already-related, a non-already-related perfect or non-perfect. In duration-quantifying and left-boundary contexts, both already-related and non-already-related markings are found with variable frequency and zero-marking is common, but already-related markings in general seldom appear together with perfects. Zero marking is common. In universally quantifying contexts already-related marking is rare, but languages in which non-already-markings are otherwise optional or obligatory tend to use them obligatorily here.