Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2008, Page 56

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Ida Larsson
c. Fríða er búin að fara til Kína.
Frida is finished to go to China
‘Frida has gone to China.’
As shown by Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson (1992), the three constructions
are not semantically equivalent, as the English translations might sug-
gest. The construction with vera + participle of an unaccusative verb
is stative and resultative: (lb) is only true if Frida is currently on a trip
to China. Also the construction with vera búinn að is restricted to cer-
tain readings. According to Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson (1992) it can only
express what is often referred to as resultative and universal per-
fects, and not the so-called experiential perfect.4
However, the distinction between hafa and vera búinn að is not
quite as clear-cut as Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson’s account might suggest
and there is a great deal of variation in modem Icelandic. In this
paper, the interpretational restrictions of vera búinn að are investigat-
ed further, with particular focus on the experiential reading. It will be
argued that the constmction with vera búinn að should, in fact, not be
analysed as a perfect tense on a par with the construction with hafa +
participle, but that it, like stative passives in languages like German
and Swedish, expresses a resultant state in the sense of Parsons (1990)
and Kratzer (2000).
The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, the different
interpretations of the perfect are introduced and related to the three
perfect-like constmctions in Icelandic. Section 2 concems the un-
grammaticality of vera búinn aó in past tense counterfactuals and its
consequences for an analysis of the construction. In section 3, the
restrictions on vera búinn að in experiential contexts are investigated
and the semantics of the construction is discussed further. Section 4
concems resultant states and the problem of the universal reading.
Section 5 concludes the paper with a summary and questions for fur-
ther work.
4 Like Comrie (1976), Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson uses the term existential perfect
for what is here referred to as the experiential perfect.