Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2008, Page 64

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Ida Larsson
(18) Ég er búin að týna lyklunum núna.
I am fínished to lose the keys now
‘I have lost the keys now.’
As pointed out by Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson (1992:134), the hafa-perfect
and the construction with vera búinn að often have different implica-
tions, largely corresponding to the distinction between experiential
and resultative perfects. The hafa-perfect in (19a) states that an event
of Mary’s baking a cake has occurred at some point in the past, i.e.
that Mary has an experience of baking a cake; it makes no claims
about the reference time. The construction with vera búinn að in
(19b), on the other hand, is a resultative perfect; it entails that the
result of the baking still obtains, and we expect there to be a cake at
reference time:
(19) a. María hefur bakað köku.
Mary has baked cake
‘Mary has baked a cake.’
b. María er búin að baka köku.
Mary is finished to bake cake
‘Mary has baked a cake.’
(Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson 1992:134)
To recap, the different readings of the perfect are taken to be seman-
tic in nature. Specifically, they relate to how the event is anchored to
time (see e.g. Iatridou et al. 2001 and Kiparsky 2002).11 The univer-
sal reading asserts that the event time holds at the reference time. The
11 Iatridou et al. (2001) and Pancheva (2003) argue that the different readings of
the perfect depend on the combination of grammatical aspect (perfective and imper-
fective) with the perfect (cf. below section 4.2.). In this way, they can predict the
availability of the different readings from the aspectual composition of the perfect
participle. In languages like English and Icelandic, the universal reading requires pro-
gressive morphology (with non-stative predicates). In Greek, the perfect participle has
perfective morphology, and the universal reading (which requires imperfective
aspect) is therefore excluded. We could account for the properties of the Icelandic
perfects in a similar fashion: the perfect participle in the hafa-perfect tends to have
perfective morphology which yields an experiential reading of the perfect.