Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1992, Blaðsíða 142

140
Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson
3.2 Bf-perfects andproportion adverbs
Our new conception of resultative perfects helps us understand why
ö/-perfects cannot take scope over adverbials like never.
(19) *Jón er aldrei búinn að hita kaffi.
John is never finished to make coffee
This sentence is ungrammatical on the reading where never takes
narrow scope w.r.t. the perfect but wide scope w.r.t. the main verb.
This reading can be paraphrased as follows: For no interval of time i,
where i is a subinterval of an extended now interval, is the proposition
‘John makes coffee’ true at i. In other words, the adverbial negates
that there has ever been an event of coffee-making. Hence, no state
is created and a resultative interpretation is blocked. Thus, we are left
with an existential interpretation in (19) which is always impossible
for bf- perfects.
On the other hand, (19) is fine if never takes scope over the perfect,
but this is hard to see unless some overt restriction on the adverbial is
present as in (20):
(20) Jón er aldrei búinn aðhita kaffi þegar María vaknar.
John is never finished to make coffee when Mary wakes up
We can paraphrase (20) as ‘it is never the case when Mary wakes
up that John has (already) made coffee’. Here the adverbial negates a
perfect and not just the main verb as in (19). Hence, there is nothing
that blocks a resultative interpretation of the perfect in (20).
It seems that proportion adverbs in general (and not just never) cannot
take narrow scope w.r.t. a b/-perfect. This is exemplified below with
the adverb yfirleitt ‘usually’:
(21) *Jón er yfirleitt búinn að svaraí símann
John is usually finished to answer thephone
þegar ég hringi.
when I call
For pragmatic reasons the wide scope reading of usually is excluded
in (21). Thus, we are stuck with the narrow scope reading that can be