Tense recursion, perfect doubling, and the grammaticalization of auxiliaries

Abstract

AbstractThe chapter deals with some notable differences in the construal of the perfect within the Germanic languages. Whereas German shows auxiliary selection between HAVE and BE, allows positional past adverbials, and has so called perfect doubling (where a perfect is construed with an additional participle of the AUX and which may induce—in addition to a pluperfect reading—an interpretation where the target state does not hold any more at speech time), English/Swedish have neither of these properties. It is suggested that nevertheless all the Germanic languages build the perfect by using a bi-clausal structure (with two T-projections) and the differences are due to different grammaticalization stages of the auxiliaries: German has developed a temporally impoverished HAVE, lacking the prepositional AT-component, cf. Kayne (1993) and thus allowing more flexibility in its use.