Perfect variations in Romance: a parallel corpus approach

Description

The HAVE PERFECT is a tense-aspect category that displays substantial cross-linguistic variation (Dahl & Velupillai 2013). The Romance languages nicely illustrate the various patterns known as the Aorist Drift (Squartini & Bertinetto 2000). Although many ingredients of the semantics of the PERFECT are known, such as its focus on the result state or post-state of a past event, its resistance to narrative sequences, and its preference for hodiernal past time reference, it remains unclear how these ingredients come together in the grammar of the PERFECT within and across Romance languages, because different authors focus on different configurations, and there is insufficient comparison of the same contexts in different languages. In the Time in Translation project, we propose to fill this gap with parallel corpus research (see https://time-in-translation.hum.uu.nl/).

In this talk, we focus on parallel corpora built from novels and their translations. Under the assumption that translators aim to render the meaning in context in the target language, form variation between original and translation can inform us of the semantics and pragmatics of the various verb forms.

A corpus study of L’Étranger by Albert Camus and its translations confirms claims from the literature (Lindstedt 2000, Schaden 2009) that French and Italian make a more liberal use of the PERFECT, whereas Spanish is closer to a ‘classical’ PERFECT language like English. It also shows that Catalan occupies a position in between French/Italian and Spanish, which leads to the concept of a PERFECT scale (van der Klis et al. 2022). A broader comparison with Germanic languages reveals that Romance languages are sensitive to hodiernality, but Germanic languages are not. Sensitivity to lexical aspect and to narrativity comes into play in both Romance and Germanic languages, but in different ways.

A second corpus study of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowlings and its translations confirms the patterns found in the Camus corpus, but only in the dialogue parts, not in the narrative discourse parts. These results highlight the importance of register for the grammar of tense: the PERFECT is a tense-aspect category that belongs to the spoken language grammar.

Period	2 Dec 2021
Event title	Going Romance
Event type	Other
Location	UtrechtShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International