On the origin and evolution of the Catalan periphrastic preterit
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Manuel Pérez Saldanya [1] ; José Ignacio Hualde [2]
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[1] Universitat de València
Universitat de València
Valencia, España
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[2] University of Illinois, Department of Spanish Italian & Portuguese
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- Localización: Verbalperiphrasen in den (ibero-)romanischen Sprachen / coord. por Claus D. Pusch, Andreas Wesch, 2003, ISBN 3-87548-319-7, págs. 47-60
- Idioma: inglés
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- Dialnet Métricas: 9 Citas
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Resumen
The development of a future tense from a construction with the verb "to go" constitutes a common path of grammaticalization (cf. Bybee et al. 1994). This is in fact what we find both in English and in most of the Romance languages, cf., for instance, Sp. va a cantar, Fr. il va chanter. In Catalan, on the other hand, the formally equivalent construction va cantar is a perfective past "(s)he sang". This evolution which, from a typological point of view, is highly anomalous, has not yet received a satisfactory explanation. Previous approaches have tried to explain the divergent evolution of the "VADO + infinitive" construction in Catalan and in other Romance languages from the assumption that at the first stage this construction had an inchoative meaning (Meyer-Lübke 1899). But it is hard to see how the shift from inchoative to perfective meaning may have taken place.
We believe that the key to understanding this development is to be found in the textual contexts where the first attestations of this contruction are embedded. These are all narrative contexts where the first attestations of this constrtuction are embedded. These are all narrative contexts where the infinitive in the "VADO + infinitive" construction is a verb of accomplishment and where there is a subsequent action expressed in the past tense. The inference in such contexts is that the action expressed by the infinitive was accomplished. The grammaticalization process can be viewed as the progressive conventionalization of the accomplishment inference with simultaneous shading of the lexical meaning of the verb of movement.
