Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2008, Page 71

Becoming Perfect: Observations on Icelandic vera búinn að 69
Following McFadden and Alexiadou (2006a, 2006b, 2007), we can
explain the impossibility of passive and resultative be in past tense
counterfactuals by assuming that the perfect-like anteriority in these
constructions is indirectly supplied by the participle by implication of
what it means to have a target state: if the target state of an event holds
at the present, the event necessarily lies in the past. Hence, in the
resultative with vera or the Danish passive with vœre, the participle,
which expresses a target state, conveys that the event is anterior to the
time set by tense (as noted in connection with the example in (5)
above), but, importantly, it does not carry past tense morphology. In
the past tense of a resultative with be, there is consequently only one
Exclusion feature, and a counterfactual will get a present tense read-
ing. In this way we can account also for the ungrammaticality of past
counterfactuals with vera búinn að: the anteriority of the event time
relative a reference time is contributed (implied) by the resultative
participle búinn and not asserted by past tense morphology. The con-
clusion, then, is that the construction with vera búinn að is not a per-
fect tense.
The adjectival or resultative participle búinn often occurs outside
the perfect, as in (33) (cf. Wide 2002). Its lexical meaning is ‘fin-
ished’, ‘done’ or ‘ready’:
(33)a. við erum búin þar á fbstudegi (ístal)
we ar finished there on Friday
‘we will be finished there on Friday’
b. það verður ekki hægt aðfaraþ..] þegar skólinn er búinn (Samtöl)
it will-be not possible to go when the school is finished
‘it will not be possible to go straight away when school has
fmished’
Ender the present account, we expect búinn to retain some lexical
properties also in the perfect-like construction. This appears to be the
case, consider (34) where búinn is modifíed as an adjectival or resul-
tative participle: