Language Contact in Europe
The Periphrastic Perfect through History

This book traces the spread of the perfect tense across Europe, demonstrating the crucial role of language contact.

Bridget Drinka (Author)

9781108731911, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 15 August 2019

505 pages, 15 b/w illus. 35 maps
23 x 15.3 x 3 cm, 0.7 kg

This comprehensive new work provides extensive evidence for the essential role of language contact as a primary trigger for change. Unique in breadth, it traces the spread of the periphrastic perfect across Europe over the last 2,500 years, illustrating at each stage the micro-responses of speakers and communities to macro-historical pressures. Among the key forces claimed to be responsible for normative innovations in both eastern and western Europe is 'roofing' - the superstratal influence of Greek and Latin on languages under the influence of Greek Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism respectively. The author provides a new interpretation of the notion of 'sprachbund', presenting the model of a three-dimensional stratified convergence zone, and applies this model to her analysis of the have and be perfects within the Charlemagne sprachbund. The book also tackles broader theoretical issues, for example, demonstrating that the perfect tense should not be viewed as a universal category.

1. Language contact in Europe: the periphrastic perfect through history
2. Languages in contact, areal linguistics and the perfect
3. The perfect as a category
4. Sources of the perfect in Indo-European
5. The periphrastic perfect in Greek
6. The periphrastic perfect in Latin
7. The Charlemagne sprachbund and the periphrastic perfects
8. The core and peripheral features of romance languages
9. The early development of the perfect in the Germanic languages
10. The semantic shift of anterior to preterite
11. The Balkan perfects: grammaticalization and contact
12. Byzantium, orthodoxy, and old church Slavonic
13. The l-perfect in North Slavic
14. Updating the notion of sprachbund: new resultatives and the circum-Baltic 'stratified convergence zone'
15. The have resultative in Slavic and Baltic
16. Conclusions.

Subject Areas: Grammar, syntax & morphology [CFK], Historical & comparative linguistics [CFF]