Vreleksá

kyonides · Joined: 28 Aug 2008 Posts: 301

I was wondering if there was any natlang that included such a feature. Just take a look at these "examples" so you get the right idea.

Normally:
I have eaten

With the prefix:
I haeaten or haveaten or heaten

In Kexyana:
Noe haeni mereneon

With prefix:
Noe haemereneon

That's a feature I'd like to include in a future conlang, not in Kexyana.
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StrangeMagic · Admin Joined: 18 Apr 2007 Posts: 640

Hmm, not those natlangs that I know.

In Spanish, it uses a "haber" which conjugates and is added in front of the past participle. (But wait, I can't remember but one of you were Spanish?)

In Chinese, it doesn't really have a perfect tense. Usually, you would just add 了 after the verb.

In Korean, the verb conjugates (still need to learn exactly how) but I believe it involves 죠. If anybody knows about the Korean one, please do tell me! ^_^

eldin raigmore · Posted: Tue Nov 04, 2008 7:08 pm Post subject:

You should check out Joan B. Hill's (Joan Bybee's) "Verb Morphology" book, or whatever the title was. It was written in the eighties.
Also look at Comries "Tense" and "Aspect".
Payne's "Describing Morphosyntax" has references to some of these books, if you can't find them from what I've said above.
I believe there are languages which do have a retrospective ("perfect") that is not analytic -- not lightverb+participle -- but is morphological instead.
But I can't think of any.
Look at
http://wals.info/feature/68
It seems to say there are 80 languages in their 222-language sample that could have a synthetic, morphological retrospective rather than a lightverb+participle analytic, periphrastic retrospective. Or at least it could be saying that.
Lightverb+nonfinite verbform (e.g. participle) is, according the the chapter text at http://wals.info/feature/description/68, the typical way cross-linguistically of constructing the "perfect", but they have only 28 languages in their sample that they specifically give such constructions for; I have to assume that means that at least 26 (probably more) of the languages in the group of 80 "other perfect" languages also use a periphrastic or analytic "perfect", probably of a lightverb+participle or lightverb+(other nonfinite verbform) type, such as "to be"+participle.
The authors of the WALS.info chapters are quite approachable and do return e-mails with answers to questions. You might write to the author(s) of chapter 68 and ask for a look at the original data, or just ask him/her a question. Probably a better idea would be to check out some of the books or articles referred to by that chapter's bibliography first; having looked at a few of them, then write the author.

Does that help? I hope so.
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eldin raigmore

Neqitan · Joined: 24 Sep 2008 Posts: 27