Aspect shifts in Indo Aryan

The grammaticalization literature notes the cross-linguistic robustness of a diachronic pattern involving the aspectual categories resultative, perfect, and perfective. Resultative aspect markers often develop into perfect markers, which then end up as perfect plus perfective markers. We introduce supporting data from the history of Old and Middle Indo-Aryan languages, whose instantiation of this pattern has not been previously noted. We provide a semantic analysis of the resultative, the perfect, and the aspectual category that combines perfect and perfective. Our analysis reveals the change to be a two-step generalization (semantic weakening) from the original resultative meaning.

Citation

Condoravdi, C.; Deo, A. Aspect shifts in Indo Aryan. Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Linguists (CIL 18): Workshop on Formal Approaches to the Relation of Tense, Aspect and Modality; 2008 July 21-26; Seoul, Korea.