From a Result to a Past Tense
How does “I have it written” turn into an ordinary past tense?
Latin habeō litterās scrīptās means “I have the letter in a written state” — a description of how the letter is now. That sentence became French j’ai écrit la lettre, which reports the writing rather than the letter, and in speech it is now the plain past: the old simple past has gone out of use. The same road runs from Old Japanese -tari to modern -ta. English started down it and stopped: have written is still a perfect, and cannot be used with yesterday.
段階
- 1
Resultative — a state something is in
[HAVE/BE] + [OBJ] + [PTCP]The sentence describes how something stands now, and the participle agrees with it like an adjective. The earlier event is implied by the state, not asserted. Latin habeō litterās scrīptās, “I have the letter written”.
タイムライン掲載LatinOld EnglishJapanese - 2
Perfect — a past event that still counts
[AUX] + [PTCP]The auxiliary and participle are reanalysed as one verb form reporting the event itself, with the result that it bears on the present. English I have written the letter, Spanish he escrito. In English and its neighbours the form resists a plain past-time adverb: not *I have written it yesterday.
タイムライン掲載FrenchEnglishGermanSpanishJapaneseSwedish - 3
Past — the present relevance drops away
[AUX] + [PTCP] = simple pastThe requirement of current relevance erodes, the form takes past-time adverbs, and it starts to crowd out whatever simple past the language had. Spoken French and southern German have gone this far.
タイムライン掲載FrenchGermanSpanishJapanese - 4
A second layer, in some varieties
[AUX] + [AUX.PTCP] + [PTCP]Where the old perfect has become a past, some varieties stack the auxiliary a second time: French passé surcomposé j’ai eu écrit, German Doppelperfekt ich habe geschrieben gehabt. These are anterior forms, largely confined to subordinate temporal clauses and to regional speech, and they have not replaced the stage-3 form. They stand outside the three-stage chain, and are shown here because they arise where it ends.
タイムライン掲載FrenchGerman
通言語的証拠
Stages 1 to 3 are the chain set out by Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca; stage 4 is a separate development that only some varieties show, listed here because it fills the gap stage 3 opens. Dates summarize the cited literature, band edges are approximate, and a language usually spends centuries with two readings available at once. Where a variety differs from the standard language, the note says so.
A state, then an event, then a past
The Latin sentence is about the letter and the condition it is in — litterae is plural in form but names a single letter, and the participle agrees with it. The French one is about the writing. Japanese arrived at the same place from 〜てあり, and modern -ta is simply the past.
Habeō litterās scrīptās.
- 自然訳
- I have the letter in a written state.
J’ai écrit la lettre.
- 自然訳
- I wrote the letter.
手紙を書いた。
tegami o kaita.
- 自然訳
- I wrote the letter.
地理的分布
各マーカーは一つの言語で、所属する例セットによって色分けされている。マーカーを開くとその言語の表現が表示される。
Marker positions are approximate cultural centres — they are not territorial claims. Tiles: OpenFreeMap · © OpenStreetMap contributors · Dark tiles: © CARTO.
比較歴史タイムライン
各言語で表現がどう重なり、競合し、置き換わるかを示す。帯にカーソルを合わせると期間と注記が表示される。
- Dominant use
- Emerging use
- Declining use
- Approximate range
- Overlap period (two forms coexist)
- 1 Resultative — a state something is in
- 2 Perfect — a past event that still counts
- 3 Past — the present relevance drops away
- 4 A second layer, in some varieties
参考文献
- Bybee & Dahl 1989 01Bybee, Joan L.; Dahl, Östen (1989).The creation of tense and aspect systems in the languages of the world.
- Bybee et al. 1994 02Bybee, Joan L.; Perkins, Revere; Pagliuca, William (1994).The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World.University of Chicago Press.
- Carey 1994 03Carey, Kathleen (1994).The grammaticalization of the perfect in Old English: An account based on pragmatics and metaphor.In Pagliuca, William (eds.), Perspectives on Grammaticalization (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 109). John Benjamins.
- Dahl 1985 04Dahl, Östen (1985).Tense and Aspect Systems.Basil Blackwell.
- Dahl 2000 05Dahl, Östen (2000).Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe.Empirical Approaches to Language Typology (EUROTYP) 20-6. Mouton de Gruyter.
- Dahl & Velupillai 2013 06Dahl, Östen; Velupillai, Viveka (2013).The Perfect.In Dryer, Matthew S.; Haspelmath, Martin (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, chapter 68. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. https://wals.info/chapter/68
- Drinka 2017 07Drinka, Bridget (2017).Language Contact in Europe: The Periphrastic Perfect through History.
- Frellesvig 2010 08Frellesvig, Bjarke (2010).A History of the Japanese Language.Cambridge University Press.
- Harris 1982 09Harris, Martin B. (1982).The “past simple” and the “present perfect” in Romance.In Vincent, Nigel; Harris, Martin B. (eds.), Studies in the Romance Verb. Croom Helm. 42–70.
- Heine & Kuteva 2002 10Heine, Bernd; Kuteva, Tania (2002).World Lexicon of Grammaticalization.Cambridge University Press.
- Shirai 1998 11Shirai, Yasuhiro (1998).Where the progressive and the resultative meet: Imperfective aspect in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English.
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