Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1992, Qupperneq 140

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Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson
The other case where /zave-perfects function like a past tense is when
tense agreement in a subordinate clause mandates the use of a present
perfect instead of a past tense:9
(17) a Jón heldur að María hafi selt bílinn.
John thinks that Mary has sold the car
(pres.) (pres.)
b *Jón heldur að María seldi bflinn.
John thinks that Mary sold the car
(pres.) (past)
In (17a) there is a genuine ambiguity between the present perfect and
the past tense as the content of John’s belief: ‘Mary has sold the car’
or ‘Mary sold the car’. Since tense agreement excludes the past tense
as seen in (17b), the present perfect must substitute for the past tense
in (17a).
Since //-perfects are semantically restricted in a way that have-
perfects are not, it is not surprising that only the latter can be used as a
past tense. In such cases, /zave-perfects are perfects only in the syntactic
sense of the word. These cases have been mentioned here primarily to
wam the reader that they fall outside the scope of my investigation,
since I am only concemed with perfects that are perfects semantically-
3. Further issues on the Icelandic perfects
3.1 Universal and resultative vs. existentialperfects
The preceding section established the important fact that bf-perfects
cannot be existential. This naturally raises the question what universal
and resultative perfects have in common as opposed to existential
perfects.
9 As expected, inferential perfects trigger a past tense in the lower clause in tense
agreement contexts as in the following example from Sigurðsson (1989:315):
(i) Jón hefur vitað að þú *sért/værir kominn.
John has known that you *are /were arrived
‘John must have known that you had arrived’