Pluractional Perfects: Anatomy of a Construction in Eonavian Spanish

Abstract

This dissertation presents an empirical and theoretical examination of Pluractional Perfects, i.e. analytic participle constructions with the semantics of a Perfect that at the same time incorporate some form of plurality at the level of the event described. This is the first study that aims at unifying through a common set of syntactic and semantic properties a group of constructions that were previously thought of as heterogeneous, and which includes the Portuguese Perfect Tense or the Galician Perfective Periphrases. The empirical weight of the dissertation comes from a particular variety of Northwestern Spanish that I call Eonavian.

In Pluractional Perfects we see a convergence of two apparently independent domains: one is the functional domain of the Perfect and its associated formal accounts; the other one is the lexical domain of pluractionality, understood as an Aktionsart-changing device. In this dissertation I argue that such convergence is actually telling us something important about the nature of the Perfect and its relation to event repeatability (or the potential for it). The connection between the two falls naturally from an analysis in which the Perfect builds up derived states.

On the syntactic side, I show that Pluractional Perfects are monoclausal structures that nevertheless do not qualify as prototypical auxiliary constructions, and neither do they qualify as light verb constructions in the sense of Butt (2010). This poses a problem to theories of complex predication that assume a clear-cut division between functional and lexical verbs. I argue for a more flexible analysis following Svenonius (2008), where the different verbs share one configurational space, only constrained by the Functional Sequence (after Starke 2001).