Midwest Slavic Conference

Yesterday I presented my research at the Midwest Slavic Conference here in Columbus, OH. This is a fun conference that a lot of the younger scholars present at. I have presented at it for seven years in a row now.

This presentation was "Semantics and Tense in Western Macedonian Dialects." Here is a link to the powerpoint presentation.

Here is a summary of my presentation. (As soon as I finish this post, I will be trying to write up my presentation to incorporate it into the chapter on the perfect for the dissertation.)

My research question is "How do semantic factors influence the choice of tense for speakers in western Macedonia? In particular how are perfect forms selected by speakers?"

I am using data from my questionnaires that I passed out to 58 students in Tetovo and Skopje Macedonia. Using the results from these, I analyze how the results differ from one dialect to another. The conclusions are still tentative, but here is what I found out.

Southwest dialects are innovative in the use of the HAVE + N/T participles, but the Skopje dialects are not far behind. Some other areas are much more conservative: Kičevo and the villages of Tetovo, in particular. The fact that the villages in Tetovo are more conservative than the city itself, combined with the fact that Skopje is quickly incorporating the HAVE perfect form into its speech leads me to believe that the HAVE perfect is being spread more through the influence of the standard language than from contact with dialects or even with other languages. That said, however, there is still more to be learned about its use in the dialects, and its likely that both the standard language and the dialects are exerting some influence on its spread.

One further note on the HAVE perfect is that its use for various semantic contexts may not be as straightforward as Bužarovska and Mitkovska 2010 have claimed. They follow the claim given in Bybee et al, 1995, that anteriors or perfects develop through a set pattern of showing up first in contexts where the subject becomes the possessor of the result of the process involved, as in the example below taken from my questionnaire (modified from the Perfect Questionnaire in Dahl 2000):

1. [I was told that you are writing a book. How many pages you _________________ by now?] (WRITE)

Answer: I _________________________________ fifty pages. (WRITE)

That is, give this context speakers are likely to use a grammatical construct of a perfect using an auxilliary of HAVE plus a participle of the verb WRITE (In English, have [you] written? --> I have written fifty pages). Bybee et. al.'s reasoning is that these type of constructions can start with the HAVE being a main verb - that is something like the idea in: how many pages do you have (that are written) by now. It is just a short shift in meaning from this to the idea behind How many pages have you written? And, as they point out there are many languages that can use a construction with HAVE in these types of contexts, even when they can't be used in other places. Some Slavic languages can be characterized in this way, as in Serbian Koliko stranica imate napisano? My good friend Motoki Nomachi (2006) wrote about this, as have other scholars. And, in general, in Macedonian these are the types of constructions that most consistently give the perfect with the HAVE auxiliary (Bužarovska and Mitkovska 2010, as well as from my results). However, in a couple of the dialects a different type of context gives the HAVE perfect more consistently, that of Experientials (statements of having experienced something):

1. [Question: Can you (= any person) swim in this lake?]

Answer: Yes, at least I _________________________________ in it several times. (SWIM)

Specifically, in the results from villages of Tetovo, these types of contexts give results with HAVE perfects than the Possessive ones. I don't know why that is the case; perhaps it is something to look at in the future. But this may be a small but significant piece of information because there is one theory that says that languages develop these categories in the same way everywhere, from Resultatives to also having Possessives to also having Experientials. This theory "Grammaticalization" is very popular and predominates investigations into the history of perfects. The counterargument is that there is not always a unidirectional development of these phenomena. I haven't stepped into the argument, but my work will give credence to one theory or another. After more analysis, I will have to come back to this question...

Two other conclusions emerge from the data, both corroborating the work of previous scholars, first is the observation that the BE + L-perfect is primarily involved in statements involving indirect or nonwitnessed evidentiality (see previous post). My data shows that this is applied fairly consistently across the dialects of western Macedonia. There is some variation in how strictly this is implemented, but it is fairly consistent. Finally, as regards the BE + N.T participle, it appears that his is most commonly found in Resultative contexts, so that as Elliott 2001, etc. have argued, it might be best to consider this not as a perfect, but as a simple resultative. In my data, about 80% of all uses of the BE + N-T perfect are in these contexts, the bulk of the remaining are found in narrative contexts which are prototypically not perfects.