Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2008, Page 84

82
Ida Larsson
Icelandic perfects with have or hafa\ perfect tense morphology is not
otherwise lexically or contextually restricted, and it does not require
the assertion time to be of limited duration. At thé same time, it is
clear that the construction with vera búinn að is not a resultative in the
same sense as e.g. the construction with vera + participle of an unac-
cusative verb. Instead, I have suggested that the construction with
vera búinn að is of a third kind, namely a construction expressing a
resultant state. In this section, we look closer at resultant states and at
the consequences this suggestion has for an account of the universal
reading with vera búinn að.
4.1 Resultant states
It is striking that of the few examples of the perfect with vera búinn
að in the parliament corpus, more than half (15/28) are existential
clause-anticipating constructions; see (55). With hafa, these are much
less common (cf. also Kress 1982:156):
(55)a. það er búið að lögfesta lækkun
it is fmished to legalize reduction
‘a reduction has been legalized’
b. eftir að búið er að samþykkja lög
after that fínished is to pass law
‘after a law has been passed’
Typically, these examples express that something has been achieved;
the embedded event is understood as completed, and there is no focus
on its internal structure (e.g. on the process of legalization in (55a)).
In languages like Swedish and German, a translation could involve a
stative passive, as in the Swedish examples in (56) below: 18
18 In Swedish and German, unlike in English and Icelandic, there is a morpho-
logical distinction between stative and eventive passives; eventive passives are
formed with an auxiliary meaning ‘become’ while stative passives have an auxiliary
meaning ‘be’. In Swedish, eventive passives, but not stative passives, allow manner
adverbials like snabbt ‘quickly’; cf. the stative passive in (i) and the eventive passive
in (ii).
(Alþingi)
(Alþingi)