Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

The goal of this study is to account for the variation in the distribution and meaning of the present perfect in Baltic and South Slavic languages by applying the Translation Mining methodology (Wälchli and Cysouw 2012; van der Klis, Le Bruyn, and de Swart 2017, i.a.). To this end, we compare the original English version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone with its translations into Bulgarian, Croatian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, and Serbian, languages in which the perfect is not the only past tense form.

We report quantitative findings showing that variation in the present perfect systems across South Slavic and Baltic is highly fine-grained. In our qualitative analysis of the corpus data, we zoom in on two key dimensions of variation, aoristic drift and evidential drift, to systematize the observed differences in the distribution of the present perfect in the investigated languages. 

On the formal side, our objective is to show that it is possible to use a shared semantic component of the present perfect, as proposed by Grønn and von Stechow (2020) and Pancheva and Zubizarreta (2023), and to correlate the reported variation patterns with systematic modes of composition of different ingredients of the core representation. We are particularly interested in auxiliary omission in evidential perfects in Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Latvian, and in their interaction with definite past-time modifiers.