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The development of the universal perfect in Arabic
- Language
- Linguistic Society of America
- Volume 95, Number 4, December 2019
- pp. 683-710
- 10.1353/lan.2019.0070
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
Arabic has a construction that expresses a universal perfect interpretation. It is here argued that this construction, which is widespread across the different vernaculars, can be analyzed as a possessive perfect construction, a structure thought to be rather rare beyond Indo-European languages spoken in Europe. I further argue that the grammaticalization path differs from that of well-known possessive perfect structures across European languages. I hypothesize that the structure which paved the way for the grammaticalization of a universal perfect construction across Arabic was a possessive structure, originally headed by a preposition, which eventually developed into a transitive verbal predicate taking an interval-denoting object as its possessum, and which subsequently grammaticalized into a construction expressing the universal perfect.