Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2008, Page 79

Becoming Perfect: Observations on Icelandic vera búinn að 77
2000:58). In this way, the construction with vera búinn að is “more
resultative” than the hafa-perfect, without expressing a resultative
perfect.
The possibility of frequency adverbials with vera búinn að is not
as unrestricted as with /zq/h-perfects. Frequency adverbials are gener-
ally grammatical in sentence final position, but, in many cases, they
are ungrammatical or degraded in a position between vera and búinn.
The judgements vary signifícantly between speakers: for some speak-
ers the example in (46b) is perfectly fíne, while others mark it as clear-
ly ungrammatical; (46a) is accepted more generally. Not all adverbs
of frequency are equally acceptable here: oft ‘often’ is less marked
than sjaldan ‘rarely’ (Michael Schafer, p.c.). The acceptability might
also depend on the non-fínite verb (cf. below section 3.4):
(46)a. Hún er búin að fara til Kína oft.
she is finished to go to China often.
‘She has gone to China often.’
b. Hún er oft búin að fara til Kína.
she is often finished to go to China
‘She has often gone to China.’
Since the construction with vera búinn að tends to have connotations
°f plan or expectation and of consequences that hold at the reference
time when occurring with adverbials of frequency and iteration (as
tvith negation), the difficulty of finding an appropriate context is like-
ly to affect the judgements somewhat. I suggested above that variation
in the acceptability of aldrei rnight, at least to some extent, be a ques-
tion of the contextual constraints rather than grammaticality. The
same might be the case also with regard to the acceptability of fre-
quency adverbials. Since the frequency of vera búinn að can vary con-
siderably between texts, this is, in fact, not completely unexpected.
3-4 Intransitive achievements
Rather surprisingly, change of location verbs like koma ‘come’ and
fara ‘go’ are degraded with vera búinn að with a resultative reading,