Abstract
Among the present-day Scandinavian languages, only Danish and possibly Faroese have a split auxiliary system where unaccusative verbs form perfects with BE, while transitive and unergative verbs form perfects with HAVE (see e.g. Vikner & Sprouse 1988, Platzack 1988, Larsson 2009, 2013); see the Danish examples in (1). 1 Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish have the auxiliary HAVE in both contexts, just like English.
Highlights
Among the present-day Scandinavian languages, only Danish and possibly Faroese have a split auxiliary system where unaccusative verbs form perfects with BE, while transitive and unergative verbs form perfects with HAVE; see the Danish examples in (1).1 Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish have the auxiliary HAVE in both contexts, just like English.(1) a
He be.PRES/have.PRES sleep.PASTPART long ‘He has slept for a long time’
The results suggest that with unaccusative verbs like fara ‘go’ Faroese has BE as the perfect auxiliary, and uses it in iterative contexts
Summary
Among the present-day Scandinavian languages, only Danish and possibly Faroese have a split auxiliary system where unaccusative verbs form perfects with BE, while transitive and unergative verbs form perfects with HAVE (see e.g. Vikner & Sprouse 1988, Platzack 1988, Larsson 2009, 2013); see the Danish examples in (1). Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish have the auxiliary HAVE in both contexts, just like English. The construction with BE does not allow a past tense reading in counterfactual contexts (unless embedded in a perfect); cf (3a-b) with the perfect in (3c) (Larsson 2009:160). If he.M.SG.NOM be.PAST.SUBJ come.PASTPART.M.SG.NOM yesterday ‘If he had come ...’. In Icelandic, Faroese and Swedish, the participle shows agreement with the subject in the construction with BE (cf Larsson 2014b). In some varieties (and depending on the verb), the perfect with HAVE is preferred to the construction with BE in a resultative context where both would be possible. This is typically the case in Present-Day Swedish. Results from the Nordic Syntax Database (Lindstad et al 2009) and the Nordic Dialect Corpus (Johannessen et al 2009) are presented below
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