Open AccessOn the perfect tense-aspect in K'ichee'an Mayan: An LFG approach
Author(s) -
Lachlan Duncan
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
proceedings of the international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1535-1793
DOI - 10.21248/hpsg.2016.12
Subject(s) - present perfect , participle , adjective , predicate (mathematical logic) , verb , linguistics , argument (complex analysis) , mathematics , computer science , philosophy , noun , biochemistry , chemistry , programming language
Previous accounts of theperfect tense-aspect in the K'ichee'an languages have concluded thatthe category or part-of-speech of the perfect is a verb, or lessoften, a participle. We believe otherwise. Empirical support ispresented for the hypothesis that the perfect is expressed usingeither a deverbal participial adjective or a deverbal possessednominal in the form of a detransitivized non-verbal predicate. We showthat the perfect always consists of a one-place intransitive but thatit, nonetheless, retains the capacity to express two argumentroles. Further, we argue that the perfect is, in fact, a perfect. Wepresent the various semantic types of perfect, including the perfectof result and the experiential perfect, and also show the temporalrestrictions that constrain the perfect. The analyses are implementedusing the syntactic architecture of LFG.