Narrative and the Catalan go-past
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Matthew L. Juge
Modern Catalan has a comparatively rare construction-type, namely a perfective past (preterit) that employs forms of the verb meaning go and an infinitive: vaig cantar ‘I sang’ (lit. ‘I-go to-sing’). Cross-linguistically, constructions of this type commonly encode future meaning. Traditional analyses attribute the origin of the construction to the narrative present, the use of present-tense forms with past-tense value in storytelling. I argue that the construction developed out of the use of the preterit of the motion verb and a purposive infinitive and that a key syncretism in Catalan verbal morphology allowed for the reanalysis of preterit forms of anar ‘to go’ as morphologically present. Later analogical changes to the auxiliary obscure the role of the preterit early in the development of the construction. This development indicates the importance of taking full advantage of textual resources in studying language change so that historical linguists can better understand diachronic processes, especially for use in reconstructing the history of languages with less robust written traditions. Analysis of this type also supplements the sometimes superficial approach used in grammaticalization studies when less data is available.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Overt and covert prestige in Late Middle English: A case study in East Anglia
- Narrative and the Catalan go-past
- Towards a description of the narrative discourse units in Tannaitic Hebrew
- Roman Jakobson, cybernetics and information theory: A critical assessment
- Will and shall as markers of modality and/or futurity in Middle English
- Company Company, Concepción, ed.: Sintaxis histórica de la lengua española. Primera parte: La frase verbal
- Christiane Marchello-Nizia: Grammaticalisation et changement linguistique
- Randall S. Gess & Deborah Arteaga, eds.: Historical Romance Linguistics: Retrospective and Perspectives
- Frederick W. Schwink: The Third Gender: Studies in the Origin and History of Germanic Grammatical Gender Ranko Matasović: Gender in Indo-European Francisco José Ledo-Lemos: Femininum Genus: A Study on the Origins of the Indo-European Feminine Grammatical Gender
