Semantics, on the other hand, is something that I have been starting to focus in on, just recently. In this post, I want to talk about some semantic variables that are important for perfects, and are the basis for the analysis I will be talking about next week at the Midwest Slavic Conference.
This post will also comprise some of what I will say on that occasion, as I am finding it a little hard to put my thoughts together anywhere else.
Perfects are grammatical categories that typically show some relation between a current situation and something that has occurred in the past, as in I have read that book. Some scholars talk about the perfect in terms of "Current Relevance" like Bernard Comrie (1976); that is to say that the perfect is used when a speaker wants to make a past action relevant to the situation being spoken about, such as the context similar to one given in a questionnaire that I used in my research:
A conversation between a friend and me. My friend (not knowing my sister, who actually is a much more accomplished reader than me - and most of my friends) says "It seems to me that your sister never finishes the books she reads." So I say (defending my sister's reputation) "That's not true, she has read that one."
Another way scholars have talked about the perfect is as a form that expresses an "Extended Now" that is, things that have been valid about a particular past event are still valid, so in the example above, it is not the fact that we are talking about reading that influences me saying has read instead of read, but rather the fact that her having read the book is still true.
Talking about perfects gets quite technical quite quickly, so I'll stop there for this post. Now on to something else that gets really technical really quickly: semantics.
Semantics, when talked about technically in linguistics has the meaning of talking about meaning. One part of semantics that is relevant in talking about perfects is the characteristics of individual verbs, such as whether they show a change of state (Telicity), a change of location (Motion verbs), whether they are repeatable (Iterative), as well as whether they require grammatical subjects and objects (transitive vs. intransitive & active vs. non-active or passive). One other part of semantics is shown in the context in the sentence. Is it something that is repeated (Iterated) is it something that has occurred in the past or is ongoing (continuous), Is it something that happened at a particular point in time (Punctuality, like at 3:00, or on January 16th, 1987), or lasted for some time (Durativity, like for three days now). A couple of other distinctions will be used in my particular research, drawing on characterizations that have been made, both in Linguistics in general, and in literature about these languages specifically.
Macedonian has three different forms that look like perfects. Graves 2000 is one of the best attempts to show how they function differently in expressing semantic differences in Macedonian. Her work is a great start in exploring the question of how the perfect forms are used in response to a variety of semantic contexts. However, there is more to be studies, as she only used a handful of surveys, and had only one speaker from Western Macedonia where there is more variation as regards the perfect constructions.
Using a very similar survey and including responses from about 60 respondents from Western and Central Macedonia, I hope to give an even more complete picture f the use of these perfects in Western Macedonia. Ultimately, I will compare this to patterns found in Albanian and Serbian dialects, but in and of it self, the temporal effects of semantics in Western Macedonia alone is worth pursuing.
The following are the semantic criteria that I am using in this analysis:
1) Evidentiality
2) Pragmatic purpose of sentence
3) Telicity
4) Repeatability
5) Iterativity
6) Criteria from the Perfect Questionnaire
7) Time reference
8) Sentence type
(I may rearrange these to make sense of what I have!)
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