Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2008, Page 80

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Ida Larsson
but grammatical on what looks like an experiential reading; cf. (47b),
which is grammatical, and (47c), which is degraded. The resultative
reading requires the construction with vera, as in (48):15
(47) a. Jón er búinn að fara til Kína.
John is fmished to go to China
‘John has been to China.’
b. Jón er búinn að fara til Kína þrisvar sinnum.
John is fmished to go to China three times
‘John has gone to China three times.’
c. ??Jón er búinn að fara til Kína núna.
John is finished to go to China now
‘John has gone to China now.’
(48) Hann er farinn til Kína núna.
he is gone to China now
‘He has gone to China now.’
As Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson (1992:144) points out, (47a) can be used to
describe a situation where John is back from the trip but not where
John has just reached the goal of the trip. Rather than having a perfect
reading, búinn appears to retain some lexical meaning and (47a) could
be translated more literally to ‘John is finished with his going to
China’. Since the result is expressed by the participle búinn, rather
than by the embedded predicate, it would also be somewhat mislead-
ing to say that the construction expresses a perfect tense. In cases like
these, there appears to be no variation between speakers.
Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson (1992:144) suggests that the construction
with vera blocks the resultative reading of the perfect with vera búinn
að. However, unaccusatives like bráðna ‘melt’, which also have
active resultative participles with vera, are grammatical with vera
búinn að in resultative perfects; cf. (49a) and (49b). The relevant dif-
15 As noted above, the resultative perfect is marginally possible with hafa.
However, examples like (i) primarily have the inferential reading:
(i) Jón hefur komið frá Boston núna.
John has come from Boston now