Assimil Catalan Plus A Past

While the Catal an go -future has often been dismis sed as a non-genuine c alque from Spanish, Radatz (2003: 61) argues that Catalan is merely following the same grammatic alization path as many other languages and that its emerging go -future can be shown to be internally motivated (my translation from the original). 5 With a proper context missing, ambiguit y may arise in spoken Catalan between a fu ture and a past interpretation when the conjugated form of the auxiliary ends in a.

The first chapter presents an overview of the use and distribution of the feature in contemporary Catalan; the second chapter discusses the diachronic and synchronic attestation of the fea ture in other Romance languages, Occitan in particular.

In chapter 3, the paper summarizes the state of the research on the grammaticalization process that underlies the gopast.

In chapter 4, finally, the hypothesis that the feature diffused from (Old) Occitan into (Old) Catalan is postulated and underpinned with both historical and linguistic data.

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Still in 1968, however, Mendeloff (1968: 319) complains that the go -past has been given only short shr ift in historical grammars, and has been the subject of only two brief studies in the p ast fifty years.

Be that as it may, Mendeloffs app eal found a response: the body of scholarship o n the Catalan go -past has multiplied rapidly s ince.

The paper is divided into four sections: section 1 discusses the use and distribution of the go -past in con- temporary Catalan; section 2 assesses the diffusion of the go -past in othe r Romance languages; section 3 deals with the historical development of the feature in question, offering a concise overview of the process of gra m- maticalization that is thought to have occasioned the emergence of the go - past.

Finally, section 4 provides a new perspective on the origin of go -past by arguing that the feature developed first in Old Occitan, only to sub- sequently diffuse into (Old) Catalan.

On the use and distribution of the go -past in contemporary Catalan 1.1 General remarks Before advancing, a terminolog ical remark is in order.

The feature that is central in this paper is generally referred to in the literature as the perfe t peri- frstic.

This term is somewhat confusing, since a perfect typically denotes an action as having begun in the past, but extending up to the present (.) or some result of which is relevant to the present (Bussmann, 2006: 876).

This definition does not apply to the Catalan perfet perifrstic.

Rather, the functions of the perfet perifrstic, which typically denotes actions completed prior to the moment of speech (i.e.

Squartini, 1998; others, e.g.

Detges, 2004, use the term aoristic past).

In the remainder of this paper, for the sake of clarity, I will use the more neutral term go -past (fo llowing e.g.

Juge, 2006) instead of perfet peri- frstic.

Obviously, for being a perfective past marker, the go -auxiliary is bound to govern dynamic predi- cates mostly.

However, similar to Spanish and Portuguese, Catalan verbs generally considered to be stative (e.g.

Catalan va saber heshe found out (cf.

Spanish supo ). 1.2 The paradigm of the go -auxiliary The degree of grammaticalization of the Catalan go -auxiliary can be illus- trated further by taking a closer look at i ts inflectional paradigm.

Table 1 (adapted from Juge, 2006: 314) contrasts the paradigm of the go -auxilia ry with that of the lexical verb from which it derives: go -AUXILIARY LEXICAL VERB indicative subjunctive indicative subjunctive 1s vaig (vreig) vagi vaig vagi 2s vas (vares) vagis vas vagis 3s va vagi va vagi 1pl vam (vremvem) vgim anem anem 2pl vau (vreuveu) vgiu aneu aneu 3pl van (varen) vagin van vagin Table 1.

Note, first, that unlike the lexical verb, the inflectional paradigm of the go -auxiliary is defective in that it cannot be conjugated for past tense.

Assimil Catalan Plus A Past

To express a pluperfect (or pretrit anterior ), Catalan takes recourse either to the periphrasis go aux haver plus a past participle (PP) (e.g.

I had lost), to the preterit forms of haver PP (e.g.

I had lost) (Ldtke, 1984: 87) or to the durative past form of haver PP: havia perdut I had lost.

Secondly, as Table 1 show s, the 1st and 2nd plural forms of the go -aux - iliary have been regularized in analogy with the remainder of the paradigm, and thus contrast with the suppletive 1st and 2 nd plural forms of the lexi- cal verb.

This again confirms that, synchronically, the go -auxiliary is seman- tically unrelated to its lexical source.

A similar case of paradigm alignment is found in Rumanian, where the verb to want has suppletive forms when.

This stylistic distribution go -past spoken, sim- ple past written is, though not identical, reminisc ent of the situation 3 In fact, similar processes of paradigmatic simplificationredu ction have affected all members of the Balkan Sprachbund, all of which have a grammaticalized want -future (Heine Kuteva, 2005: 189).

Radatz (2003) deals with the emergence of the go -future in Catalan.

With a proper context missing, ambiguit y may arise in spoken Catalan between a fu ture and a past interpretation when the conjugated form of the auxiliary ends in a.

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