Read more
This book traces the spread of the perfect tense across Europe, demonstrating the crucial role of language contact.
List of contents
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.
About the author
Bridget Drinka is a Professor and former Chair of the Department of English at the University of Texas, San Antonio. She has taught at a number of universities worldwide, and has written extensively on Indo-European temporal-aspectual categories, cladistic models of language relationship, stratification as a mapping tool, the 'sacral stamp' of Greek, and on other topics related to her interest in Indo-European, historical, and socio-historical linguistics. She serves as President of the International Society for Historical Linguistics, and as Associate Editor of Folia Linguistica Historica.
Summary
This book provides an in-depth analysis of the role of language contact as a motivator for change. It will appeal to students and researchers of historical linguistics, contact linguistics, language typology, and sociolinguistics, as well as to specialists in Romance, Germanic, Slavic, and other language families of Europe.
