On the perfect tense-aspect in K'ichee'an Mayan: An LFG approach

Abstract

Previous accounts of the perfect tense-aspect in the K'ichee'an languages have concluded that the category or part-of-speech of the perfect is a verb, or less often, a participle. We believe otherwise. Empirical support is presented for the hypothesis that the perfect is expressed using either a deverbal participial adjective or a deverbal possessed nominal in the form of a detransitivized non-verbal predicate. We show that the perfect always consists of a one-place intransitive but that it, nonetheless, retains the capacity to express two argument roles. Further, we argue that the perfect is, in fact, a perfect. We present the various semantic types of perfect, including the perfect of result and the experiential perfect, and also show the temporal restrictions that constrain the perfect. The analyses are implemented using the syntactic architecture of LFG.