Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2008, Page 67

Becoming Perfect: Observations on lcelandic vera búinn að 65
sons’ (1990) resultant state and not a target state. That is, the con-
struction with vera búinn að appears to express not the target state fol-
lowing a telic event, but a state that is the result of any kind of event,
and which is not specifíed by the predicate; cf. (12) above. Under this
view, the resultant state of an event E is defined as “the state of E's
occurring with respect to some past time, and so it begins to hold
immediately after E occurs and continues to hold forever” (Vlach
1993:260). There are two immediate problems with an account of
vera búinn að along these lines. First, Parsons introduces the resultant
state to account for the semantics of the perfect tense, and it can,
hence, not be used to distinguish between two kinds of perfects, with-
out additional assumptions. Secondly, like many others, Parsons does
not account for the universal perfect; the universal reading asserts that
the event holds at the reference time, and not that a state following the
event does (see e.g. Mitwoch 1988, Iatridou et al. 2001 and Kiparsky
2002).
In the following, it will be suggested that the resultant state read-
ing is possible outside the perfect (just like the resultative reading is
possible with vera), and that it is, in fact, not a characteristic of the
perfect tense (cf. also the discussion of the semantics of the perfect in
e-g. Iatridou et al. 2001 and Rothstein 2008). Moreover, I propose that
the construction with vera búinn að expresses a resultant state and not
a target state, and that the difference between the hafa-perfect and the
eonstruction with vera búinn að is due to the fact that only the former
's a perfect tense. I retum to the problem of the universal perfect
briefly at the end of the paper.
As noted above, a past perfect, unlike a simple past tense, involves
two levels of past; it places the event time before the reference time
and the reference time before the speech time. We will see in the next
section that this difference between the past perfect and the simple
Past is crucial for the interpretation of counterfactuals in languages
like Icelandic.