Arndt Wigger | Studienhaus für Keltische Sprachen und Kulturen (SKSK), Königswinter
Past tense marked for perfective aspect, resultative, or other typical features of grammatical perfect
forms is clearly in evidence in all of the modern Celtic languages, although not normally listed in the standard paradigms. An
overview of usages in the modern languages will be given here, the major structures being of fairly recent origin. The formal
structure is periphrastic throughout, divided between an older type employing the preposition ‘after’, and a newer one which
shows some resemblance to the have-perfects in many other European languages. In agreement with previous authors,
these major formal types will be referred to as p1 and p2 respectively. As the question of active vs.
passive is crucial here, this side of the matter will be discussed to some extent, as will be the issue of syntactically
reduced structures containing traces of a perfect tense. Questions of contact-induced change will not be addressed in this
descriptive overview, except on some minor points. Given the grammatical and semantic complexity of this matter, with
different developments over six literary languages and a multitude of dialectal varieties, the early (pre)history will not be
discussed in much detail here.
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