Perfects in Indo-European Languages and Beyond

This volume provides a detailed investigation of perfects from all the branches of the Indo-European language family, in some cases representing the first ever comprehensive description. Thorough philological examinations result in empirically well-founded analyses illustrated with over 940 examples. The unique temporal depth and diatopic breadth of attested Indo-European languages permits the investigation of both TAME (Tense-Aspect-Mood-Evidentiality) systems over time and recurring cycles of change, as well as synchronic patterns of areal distribution and contact phenomena. These possibilities are fully exploited in the volume. Furthermore, the cross-linguistic perspective adopted by many authors, as well as the inclusion of contributions which go beyond the boundaries of the Indo-European family per se, facilitates typological comparison. As such, the volume is intended to serve as a springboard for future research both into the semantics of the perfect in Indo-European itself, and verb systems across the world’s languages.

Thanasis Giannaris, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens:
The book’s title accurately depicts its truly unparalleled scope: literally all individual IE languages (or branches) are represented at least in one of the book’s chapters, which are all written by an outstanding collection of contributors. One of the book’s biggest merits is that it succeeds to sound out the intersection of Indo-European linguistics with cutting-edge expertise in typological matters and theoretically informed strands of general linguistics, especially semantics, language change, and contact.