The speaker and the perfective auxiliaries hafa and vera in Icelandic

The speaker and the perfective auxiliaries hafaand vera in Icelandic§

Toshiko Yamaguchia,*, Magnus Peturssonb

aDepartment of Japanese Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore,

BLK AS4, 9 Arts Link, Singapore 117570, Republic of SingaporebInstitut fur Phonetik, Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft und Indogermanistik, University of Hamburg,

Bogenallee 11, 20144 Hamburg, Germany

Accepted 3 September 2001

Abstract

Icelandic has two auxiliary verbs, hafa ‘have’ and vera ‘be’, to express two types of perfec-tivity assigned to the sentence, which are called in this paper ‘experiential perfect’ and ‘perfect

of result’. This paper seeks to explain the behavior of these auxiliaries from semantic andpragmatic perspectives with a special focus on vera. We argue that the most important factorin understanding the distinction between hafa and vera is that the perfect of result inter-

pretation, encoded mostly in vera-sentences, arises in association with the speaker’s differentroles in speech events. We propose that the speaker is taken as a vantage point in the inter-pretation of vera-sentences and the resultant state is portrayed in accordance with his variousinvolvements in the events. Properties of aspect such as telicity or the inferable eventual

position of an entity, which have been proposed as key components in accounts of auxiliaryselection, are shown to play no decisive role in Icelandic.# 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Icelandic; Perfective auxiliaries; Experiential perfect; Perfect of result; Speaker

Language Sciences 25 (2003) 331–352

www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci

0388-0001/03/$ - see front matter # 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/S0388-0001(03)00005-6

§ Part of this paper was presented at the Workshop on Perfective Auxiliaries held at Manchester

University in June 2000 and we are grateful for the feedback we received there.

* Corresponding author.

E-mail address: [email protected] (T. Yamaguchi).

http://www.sciencedirect.com



http://www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci/a4.3d

mailto:[email protected]

1. Introduction

The aim of this paper is to provide a semantic and pragmatic account of theselection of Icelandic auxiliary verbs, hafa ‘have’ and vera ‘be’, when they appearwith the past participle form of intransitive verbs. In previous literature on auxiliaryselection it has often been observed that the difference between HAVE and BE isaspectual cross-linguistically and that the criteria for their selection relate to prop-erties of aspect such as telicity or boundedness (Sorace, 1999; Zaenen, 1993; amongothers). Accordingly, most current research has focused on the lexical semantics ofthe predicate (Lieber and Baayen, 1997) or a lexical syntactic property of the pre-dicate such as the contrast between unaccusative and unergative verbs (Levin andRappaport Hovav, 1995; Sorace, 1999).This study is based on representative verbs extracted from a collection of 274

verbs and indicates that the exact account of Icelandic auxiliary selection requires amore elaborate analysis than that of the previous studies. The formal characteristicsof auxiliaries significant to our discussion are the following four: (i) the two aux-iliaries do not always behave in the same way, (ii) directional and manner adverbialsaffect the formation of the vera-perfect, (iii) hafa and vera are interchangeable withsome verbs, (iv) some verbs only allow hafa.1

The main claim of this paper is that there are two essential factors in Icelandicthat determine the auxiliary selection; one is the two sentential meanings associatedwith the use of an auxiliary, and the other is the speaker’s viewpoint on the scenedesignated by the past participle.The concept of the speaker has been captured in at least two ways in the linguistic

literature; one is to consider the speaker as someone who voices his expressive atti-tude towards the proposition (cf. Palmer, 1986) and various modal expressions fallinto this category; the other is to consider the speaker as the reference point fromwhich a given speech event is judged or described (cf. Langacker, 1990) and variousdeictic expressions are subsumed under this category. In this paper, we base ouranalysis on the latter definition. In the course of discussion, we will encounter sev-eral cases in which the role of the speaker extends beyond the concept of thespeaker’s perspective, as defined in Langacker (1990, pp. 6ff.), in that he takes therole of making more subjective or expressive judgments by becoming involved in the

1 We have so far found the following 19 intransitive verbs that can take only vera, but not hafa. This

set of verbs serves as a reference but not as part of the objective of this paper.

aflıDa ‘decline’, anda ‘die’, baga ‘be handicapped’, buga ‘be troubled’, grenna ‘become thin’, gretta ‘be

distorted’, hopa ‘be crowded’, hugna ‘be pleased’, hvıla ‘rest’, hæra ‘get gray hair’, lata ‘die’, megra ‘become

thin’, morva ‘become fat’, skrama ‘get scratches’, tenna ‘get teeth’, vinga ‘be friends with’, vitka ‘become

conscious’, yggla ‘wrinkle’, æjaka ‘be afflicted’.

332 T. Yamaguchi, M. Petursson / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 331–352

internal structure of given situations.2 Thus, one major objective of this paper is toexplain these different, but related, roles of the speaker in connection with auxiliaryselection in Icelandic.The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 the basic characteristics of the

occurrence of hafa and vera are briefly reviewed, whereby two sentential meanings,‘experiential perfect’ and ‘perfect of result’, and three semantic factors receive spe-cial attention. In this section it will be shown why aspectual approaches are notquite appropriate to the analysis of Icelandic auxiliary selection. In Section 3 we willshow cases that substantiate the relevance of the speaker: (i) speaker as a vantagepoint, (ii) speaker’s spatial orientations, (iii) speaker as an estimator of a given sit-uation, (iv) speaker as a commentator, and (v) speaker as a decision-maker in con-text. Finally, in Section 4, a brief summary of our discussion and some conclusionsare presented.

2. Semantics of the constructions

2.1. Experiential perfect and perfect of result

It has been claimed that sentences in which hafa ‘have’ and vera ‘be’ occur yieldtwo different semantics (Einarsson, 1945, p. 141). Yamaguchi (2000) proposes,adopting the terms in Comrie (1976, pp. 56–59), that the meanings of hafa andvera are differentiated in that the former expresses ‘experiential perfect’ (hence-forth EP) and the latter ‘perfect of result’ (henceforth PR).3 More precisely, asentence in which hafa appears expresses a past experience of the referent of thesubject, not having direct access to the present situation in which the utterance ismade, while a sentence in which vera occurs makes reference to the present sit-uation that arises as a consequence of the denoted activity. Examples shown in(1)–(4) illustrate cases in point: (1) does not necessarily denote that the window isstill broken, since it only concerns the fact that the event of breaking took place atsome distant or remote time in the past, while in (2) the window is indicated to bestill in the state of being broken; thus it bears current relevance. Similarly, while(3) with the motion verb fara ‘go’ merely describes a past experience of Peter, (4)

2 Langacker (1990: 5) refers to the notion of conceptualizer rather than speaker to emphasize his role to

‘‘construe the situation and portray it for expressive purposes’’. Although this notion might better fit our

discussion, we retain in this paper the notion of the speaker which is used more conventionally in the

linguistic literature.3 It is worthy of mention that the Icelandic perfect includes more than these two meanings. In parti-

cular, the hafa-perfect can occasionally express the speaker’s inference on the basis of the prima facie

evidence available to him at the reference time. Inferentiality in conjunction with the present perfect has

been mentioned in the previous literature (Comrie, 1976; Davidsen-Nielsen, 1990; Haugen, 1972), and

Icelandic marks, to our mind, one interesting instance of this type. This topic goes beyond the scope of

this paper, and, hence, we refrain from dealing with it.

T. Yamaguchi, M. Petursson / Language Sciences 25 (2003) 331–352 333

refers to the situation in which Peter is no longer at the location, since he has justgone somewhere.4

(1)
Glugginn hefur brotnaD. window has broken ‘The window (has) broken’
(2)
Glugginn er brotnaDur. window is broken ‘The window (is) broken’
(3)
Petur hefur fariD. Peter has gone ‘Peter (has) gone’
(4)
Petur er farinn. Peter is gone ‘Peter (is) gone’’5
Difference in remoteness can be verified by means of the following examples.6

Examples (5) and (6) are contrasted due to their sensitivity to the time adverbial rettaDan ‘just now’, which counts as an expression for the recent past. The compatibilitywith vera, as in (5), signals the closeness to the current situation, whereas theincompatibility with hafa, as in (6), refers to its more remote status.

4 Note that past participles agree with the subject in number and gender when vera is chosen, but not

when hafa is chosen (see Yamaguchi, 2000: 307–308 for more examples). In view of this, SigurDsson (1989,

pp. 188, 308, 330), among others (see Jonsson, 1992), states that the agreement rules for adjectives and

past participles are the same, concluding that past participles are to be adjectival. Although we agree with

this morphosyntactic fact, it should still be mentioned that adjectives and past participles are not con-

strued semantically in the same way. The compatibility of an adverb still is often used as an indicator of

the stativity of a given sentence (Nedjalkov, 1988; Bybee et al., 1994). In Icelandic enn or ennæa ‘still’ is

compatible with both adjectives and past participles but their semantics are differentiated in that stativity

is only expressed by adjectives. Consider the following contrast:

Hann er enn/ennæa ungur. (adjective)

‘He is still young’ (=state)

Hann er enn/ennæa farinn. (past participle)

‘He (is) gone once again’ (=dynamic)

From the fact that the presence of past participles facilitates the repetitive interpretation, we can say that

past participles still contain a verbal component in their semantics.5 In order to alert the reader to which auxiliary is used in the original sentence, we leave the corre-

sponding English auxiliaries in glosses and use parentheses in the English free translation.6 FriDjonsson (1989, p. 106) also remarks on the difference between hafa and vera with respect to

remoteness. He claims that Hann hefur gert skyldu sına ‘He has done his duty’, which contains hafa, is

more remote than Hann er buinn aD gera skyldu sına ‘He has finished doing his duty’, which contains vera.


(5) Petur er farinn rett aDan.
Peter is gone just now ‘Peter (is) gone just now’
(6)
?Petur hefur fariD rett aDan.7
Peter
has gone just now
Remoteness becomes more obvious with the contrast in (7) and (8), since the dino-saurs lived thousands years ago, which does not have relevance to the present time,and such a context is only describable with hafa.

(7)
*RisaeDlur eru hlaupnar her. dinosaurs (are) run here
(8)
RisaeDlur hafa hlaupiD her. dinosaurs have run here ‘Dinosaurs (have) run here’
2.2. Three basic semantic factors

Yamaguchi (2000) shows that the availability of vera is sensitive to three featuresof the event encoded by the main verb, and they are exemplified by the compatibilityof adverbial expressions, as briefly illustrated in (9). There are certain sets of verbs,which otherwise do not permit vera, that can take it only when some supplementalelement is introduced into the sentence; these factors are characterized as ‘reces-sional’, ‘directed’, and ‘completed’, respectively. For instance, a verb like fljota‘float’ can only allow vera when the adverbial like burt ‘away’ is supplemented (9a).Likewise, flyja ‘flee, escape’ cannot appear with vera without an adverbial like tilstoDvarinnar ‘to the station’ (9b). Similarly, the verb snjoa is compatible with verawhen it appears with vel ‘well’, signaling that a certain extent of snowing has beencompleted (9c).

(9)
a. the verb expresses recessional motion, {e.g. fljota burt ‘to float away’ [see also example (10]}
b.
the verb expresses a directed motion, (e.g. flyja til stoDvarinnar ‘to flee to the station’) [see also example (15)]
c.
the verb expresses a completed event. {e.g. snjoa vel ‘to snow well’ [see also example (26)]}
7 Note that sentence (6) is grammatical if it is interpreted as inferential.


Interestingly, the selection of hafa is insensitive to the presence or absence ofadverbials. Unlike other languages such as Dutch,8 most adverbials, as shown in (9),can readily appear with hafa in Icelandic, as can be seen in (10b). The crucial dif-ference between (10b) and (10d) lies in the different sentential meanings: (b) is EP,while (d) is PR.

(10)
a. Laufin hafa flotiD. leaves have floated ‘Leaves (have) floated’
b.
Laufin hafa flotiD burt. leaves have floated away ‘Leaves (have) floated away’
c.
*Laufin eru flotin. Leaves are floated
d.
Laufin eru flotin burt. leaves are floated away ‘Leaves (are) floated away’
Furthermore, hafa accepts an adverbial which denotes a spatial dimension where theaction takes place, while vera is still ungrammatical with such an expression. Con-sider examples in (11).

(11)
a. Jon hefur ekiD. John has driven ‘John (has) driven’
b.
*Jon er ekinn. John is driven
c.
Jon hefur ekiD ı Reykjavık. John has driven in Reykjavik ‘John (has) driven in Reykjavik’
d.
*Jon er ekinn ı Reykjavık. John is driven in Reykjavik
Examples in (12) which contain time expressions, ı manuD ‘for a month’ and amanuDi ‘in a month’, illustrate essentially the same point; hafa provides more possi-bilities for combinations, while the behavior of vera is more restricted.

(12)
a. GrasiD hefur sprottiD ı/a manuD(i). grass has grown for/in a month ‘The grass (has) grown for/in a month’
8 See examples presented in Zaenen (1993, pp. 136ff.), particularly the sections on auxiliary selection.


b.
GrasiD er sprottiD *ı/a manuD(i). grass is grown for/in a month ‘The grass (is) grown in a month’
What we can sum up from (11) and (12) and previous examples is that the vera-perfectis confined semantically to expressions of the resultant state at the current time ofreference, but not to the past activity, imparting more restrictions on its for-mation.Referring back to (9), there seems to be a system that governs the occurrenceof vera. Semantically, the factors in (9) can be understood as aspectual in the sensethat they refer to different temporal phases of an event (Comrie, 1976:3). However,as we will now explore, these factors are neither consonant with the concept of teli-city (Zaenen, 1993) nor with another related aspectual notion, the inferable eventualposition of an entity (Lieber and Baayen, 1997).Compatibility with a directionalphrase or a prefix has often been taken as a diagnostic to indicate telic eventuality(Zaenen, 1993, pp. 136ff.). For instance, in Dutch an activity verb like lopen ‘run’ turnsinto a telic verb by adding a directional phrase such as naar huis ‘to the house’ or adirectional prefix weg ‘away’. That is, BE is chosen in Dutch when the verb expressesan event that comes to an end (13b) or is bounded (13c).

(13)
a. Hij heeft/*is gelopen. He has/is run ‘He (has) run’
b. Hij ?heeft/is naar huis gelopen.
He has/is to house run ‘He (has) run to the house’
c. Hij *heeft/is weggezwommen.
He has/is swum.away ‘He (is) swum away’
The verb hlaupa ‘run’ in Icelandic cannot appear with vera without adverbial modi-fication; however, it accepts telic adverbials equally in both hafa and vera-sentences, asshown in (14). Together with examples in (10), examples in (14) signal that endpoint-orientation is not crucial to the distinction between the two auxiliaries in Icelandic.

(14)
a. Petur hefur hlaupiD. Petur has run ‘Joa (has) run’
b. Petur hefur hlaupiD burt/til hussins/fra
Petur has run away/to house.the/from æorpinu. village.the ‘Petur (has) run away/to the house/from the village’

c. *Petur er hlaupinn.
Petur is run
d. Petur er hlaupinn burt/ til hussins/fra æorpinu.
Petur is run away/to house.the/from village.the ‘Petur (is) run away/to the house/from the village’
In addition, it is worthy of mention that an Icelandic verb like flyja ‘flee, escape’ issensitive to the distinction between (13b) and (13c): this verb can only permit verawhen it co-occurs with til Selfoss, but is slightly odd with burt, as shown in (15). Inother words, (13b) and (13c) should be semantically distinguished in Icelandic andcannot be subsumed under a single concept of telicity, contrary to Zaenen’s claim(1993).

(15)
Hans er fluinn ?burt/til Selfoss. Hans is fled away/to Selfoss ‘Hans (is) fled to Selfoss’
A similar claim is made by Lieber and Baayen (1997), who propose the notion ofinferable eventual position or state to mean that verbs which allow BE require asingle aspectual component that the eventual position or state is inferred. This pro-posal is based on the behavior of a verb in Dutch like vluchten ‘flee’ which takes BEbut is infelicitous with a telic time expression (e.g. ‘in an hour’), showing that what isrelevant for the selection of BE is not telicity but the possibility of the inference ofan eventual position, without being explicit about what exactly this position is.Thus, in the case of (15), they would state that it is sufficient to say that the meaningof flyja ‘flee’ allows us to infer the eventual position, namely, that ‘Hans is at Selfoss’or ‘Hans is fleeing toward Selfoss’. If we look at another type of motion verb ramba‘waddle, stagger’ (16) and compare it with flyja in (15), however, it becomes clearthat the inference of an eventual position is not a sufficient or overarching criterionto explain why vera is licensed with these verbs.

(16)
Hans er rambaDur burt/til Selfoss. Hans is waddle away/to Selfoss ‘Hans (is) waddled away/to Selfoss’
The fact that ramba can take both burt and til Selfoss raises the question of why flyjacannot do so despite the essential similarity in meaning. It would be more appro-priate to say, along the lines we proposed in (9), that the availability of vera dependson different phases of an event; that is, flyja is only compatible with the directionalcomponent of an event, while ramba allows both the direction and inception of anevent. Similarly, a verb like ganga ‘go’, as shown in (17), is felicitous with vera whenit is combined with ut ‘out’ but not with fra Selfossi ‘from Selfoss’. According to


Lieber and Baayen, these two adverbials would have to be treated conceptually inthe same way, in that they contribute to express the meaning that ‘something is awayfrom a designated location’, inferring the eventual position of an entity. It is clear,however, that the behavior of ganga can be accounted for correctly if we makereference to two different types of inceptive event. As shown in (18), the verb flana‘rush’ behaves similarly.9

(17)
Jon er genginn ut/*fra Selfossi. John is gone out/from Selfoss ‘John (is) gone out’
(18)
Jon er flanaDur ut/*ur stoDinni. John is rushed out/from station.the ‘John (is) rushed out’
Furthermore, not all Icelandic activity verbs are compatible with the directionalphrase, which, it has been claimed, will change atelic eventuality into telic even-tuality. Verbs such as synda ‘swim’ and dansa ‘dance’ are conventionally consideredto express an atelic eventuality or a manner of motion (Jackendoff, 1990, p. 88;Sorace, 1999, p. 50; Levin, 1993, pp. 265ff.; —Lieber and Baayen, 1997, p. 806; VanValin and LaPolla, 1997, pp. 82ff.; Zaenen, 1993, pp. 136ff.). However, only syndaaccepts the directional phrase to be compatible with vera, as can be seen in thecontrast between (19) and (20) [see also example (43)].

(19)
Jon er syntur yfir a arbakkann. Jon is swum to riverbank.the ‘Jon (is) swam to the riverbank’
(20)
*Jon er dansaDur ut a horn. Jon is danced to corner.the
The above examples indicate that the three factors proposed in (9) neatly illus-trate the basic tendency of Icelandic auxiliaries and are preferable to the analysisbased on telicity or the inferable eventual position of an entity. Importantly, how-ever, the examples and their behaviors presented above also hint at the possibilityof different interpretations of the same data: the behavior of various adverbialexpressions, as seen in (10)–(12) and (14)–(19), could be reinterpreted in deicticterms taking the speaker as a vantage point.10 Without having to rely so much onaspectual differentiations, which are essentially objective criteria, reference to the

9 It is worthy of mention that there are verbs whose behavior is more restricted when they appear with

vera. For instance, the verb blossa ‘blaze’ accepts a source adverbial ur ruslinu ‘out of rubbish’ with hafa,

whereas vera is not compatible with it. The following is a list of some representative verbs which behave

similarly to blossa: ana ‘rush’, flakka ‘wander’, ganga ‘go, walk’, horfa ‘retreat’, æoka ‘move a little’ . . ..10 See Levinson (1983, pp. 79ff.) for various instances of place deixis for general reference.


location of the speaker, who views the ongoing situation, will enable us to accountfor why there are such choices of spatial expressions to license the vera-perfect, forinstance, as we saw in (9), and why these expressions are not available equally forall verb classes, for example, as we saw in (15) and (16). Moreover, the fact thatthe behavior of vera is more restricted than hafa clearly indicates that what isdescribed in vera and what hafa conveys are not semantically identical. Thus, ournext task is to test the hypothesis that the speaker’s subjective viewpoint exertsdirect influence on the interpretation of perfective events. The next section elabo-rates fine-grained functions of the speaker from spatial and cognitive/pragmaticpoints of view.

3. Different roles of the speaker

3.1. Speaker as a vantage point

Langacker (1990, p. 6) states that certain sentences make reference to the existenceof the speaker, who is taken as a vantage point from which scenes are viewed. Theobvious example is a deictic expression; (21) contains a deictic here whose inter-pretation requires information about where the speaker is located, i.e. from a spatialvantage point.

(21)
Please sit down here.
Expressions with a verb like go also routinely require a deictic interpretation. (22)can be glossed in two ways according to where the speaker’s vantage point is: one isthat ‘‘he is moving away from the speaker’s location’’ (Levinson, 1983, p. 83), andthe other is that he is moving away from a location which is in the speaker’s view.

(22)
He is going.
Examples with Icelandic auxiliaries we have already observed can be interpretedmore appropriately by taking the role of the speaker into account. Looking moreclosely at examples (4) and (14d), repeated here as (23) and (24), respectively, wenotice that their correct interpretation essentially needs a reference to the speaker asa vantage point from which Peter’s movement is described.

(23)
Petur er farinn. Peter is gone ‘Peter (is) gone’
(24)
Petur er hlaupinn burt. Petur is run away ‘Peter (is) run away’

The semantics we provided for (23) and (24), which is also acknowledged by gram-marians of Icelandic (Einarsson, 1945, p. 141; Glendening, 1966, p. 31), is ultimatelythe positional, but not necessarily directional, interpretation such that ‘Peter is nolonger at a designated location’. The only difference between these two is the meansutilized by Petur: in (23) it is going, while in (24) it is running. This interpretationassumes that Peter’s absence is viewed from the speaker’s perspective, who inter-venes spatially between Peter’s movement and his absence by highlighting theresultant state. It is obvious that ‘Peter’s absence’ is not a necessary part of the lex-ical meaning of fara ‘go’ or hlaupa ‘run’, which lends support to the view that theinterpretation of the vera-perfect requires the speaker as a vantage point from whichan activity and its result are described.

3.2. Speaker’s spatial orientations

The speaker’s commitment to the situation can also be highlighted by means ofadverbials. Recall that a verb like fljota ‘float’ (9a) requires adverbial modification tobe compatible with vera. (25) shows different types of adverbials which facilitate theselection of vera. The speaker can choose different orientations according to thedifferent spatial zones through which an entity such as leaves can pass: the speakersees leaves differently depending on how he attends to the moving entities, whileverifying the truth about the resultant state that the leaves are no longer at thelocation. All these adverbials denote different distal positions of leaves, away fromsome location, viewed from the speaker.

(25)
a. Laufin eru flotin burt. leaves are floated away ‘Leaves (are) floated away’
b.
Laufin eru flotin ur holunni. leaves are floated from hole.the ‘Leaves (are) floated from the hole’
c.
Laufin eru flotin til sjavar. leaves are floated to sea.the ‘Leaves (are) floated to the sea’
The perception of these spatial orientations by the speaker might explain why thereare such combinatory possibilities with verbs such as flyja ‘flee’, ramba ‘waddle’,ganga ‘go’, or flana ‘rush’, as shown in Section 2.2.

3.3. Speaker’s estimation

There are verbs which can accept vera by adding manner adverbials such as vel‘well’, or illa ‘badly’ rather than a spatial expression. A verb like snjoa ‘snow’ differsfrom fljota ‘float’ in that it does not allow an adverbial such as niDur ‘down’ thatexpresses a directed motion, as shown in (26a). Neither is the telic adverbial likealveg ‘completely’, entirely acceptable, as in (26b). This verb is only compatible with


vera when an adverbial like vel ‘well’ co-occurs, as in (26c).11 This sentence referseither to a heavy snowfall which has occurred or to a snowy scene caused by snow-falls. It is evident that these possible interpretations correlate with the point of viewof the speaker, who comments on the situation with which he is associated. The factthat the speaker merely refers to the result or resultant state that arises as a con-sequence of snowing, rather than a dynamic interpretation of snowing, might meanthat the permissibility of (26c) concerns the speaker’s subjective judgment of thepresent situation, which we term ‘speaker’s estimation’.

(26)
a. ? aD er snjoaD niDur. it is snowed down
b.
? aD er alveg snjoaD. it is completely snowed
c.
aD er vel snjoaD. it is well snowed ‘It (is) snowed well’
The verb snjoa is not the only member of this category. The following example isextracted from a newspaper MorgunblaDiD (15 September 2000, p. 84) reporting thatpupils have slept badly after the weekend or a long holiday. The verb sofa ‘sleep’,which does not accept vera on its own, can appear with it when the adverb illa‘badly’ co-occurs.12 Here the teacher interprets a given situation to mean that pupilsare often disturbed in a classroom in a particular way when affected by lack of sleep,especially after a holiday. In other words, vera is used to highlight the present sit-uation of the children’s being tired in conjunction with her estimation of their lackof sleep.

(27)
Hun segir aD nemendur seu oft illa she says that pupils be.SUBJ.PRS often badly
sofnir eftir helgarfrı eDa lengri skolaleyfi.
slept after weekend-leave or longer leave.from.school ‘She (=teacher) says that pupils (are) often badly slept after the weekend or a long leave from school’
11 One informant preferred the sentence with hafa instead of vera to indicate the PR. In that case, snjoa

‘snow’ comes close to batna ‘become better’, daga ‘dawn’, or kvolda ‘become evening’ which express PR

with hafa (see Section 3.4.1), the difference being that snjoa cannot encode the notion of open-endedness

like the verbs listed in (31). We are not able to give an exact account of this issue at present, though some

kind of speaker preference might also play a part in the selection of auxiliaries, particularly when sen-

tences with vera and hafa turn out to have the current relevance semantics.12 Note that vera appears in the present subjunctive form, as the context is reported speech constructed

by the pupils’ teacher.


3.4. Speaker’s subjective commitment

Icelandic has a number of verbs expressing a spontaneous change of state, many ofwhich are characterized by the morphological marker -n-, (of Germanic origin),expressing events that normally occur without agentive control (Kemmer, 1993, p. 147).Though not all change of state verbs necessarily contain -n- to express an agentless,spontaneous change [see for example the verbs in (30) and (31)], what is noteworthy,upon closer examination, is that these verbs do not behave uniformly with regard toauxiliary selection. Their complex behavior leads us to propose that the speaker com-mits himself more subjectively to the internal structure of a given situation. All changeverbs permit hafa and vera formally, but only certain verbs allow two readings, EP andPR; the rest permit PR in unmarked cases. The purpose of this section is to explain whychange verbs in Icelandic do not behave uniformly with respect to auxiliary selection. Inorder to do so, we select two distinct classes of change verbs and base our analysis onthe role of the speaker, who is understood to construe the situation in two slightly dif-ferent ways. In the case of verbs such as brotna ‘break’ or bresta ‘crack’, which express apunctual change, the speaker describes the state that results from the accomplishmentof the change event. By contrast, verbs such as batna ‘become better’, daga ‘dawn’, orkvolda ‘become evening’, whose core meaning is, we suggest, the open-endedness of achange event, encode the speaker as a commentator, who comments on the maintainedchange of state. In the next section we describe behavioral differences between twotypes of change verbs in Icelandic from a semantic and pragmatic perspective.

3.4.1. Semantic differenceAs we have mentioned, a sentence like (28) has a PR reading, that is, it expresses a

resultant state that arises as a consequence of the past activity of cracking expressedby the main verb bresta ‘crack’. We can say that a new situation has been broughtabout and it endures in the vicinity of the speaker.

(28)
GlasiD er brostiD. glass.the is cracked ‘The glass (is) cracked’
The verb bresta also allows hafa and it permits the EP reading, such that the crack-ing of the glass happened sometime in the past: the speaker is not concerned aboutwhether the situation has stayed the same or whether, for example, another instanceof cracking has taken place.

(29)
GlasiD hefur brostiD. glass.the has cracked ‘The glass (has) cracked’
Quite a few verbs behave like bresta and the following is a selection.


(30) brotna ‘break’, detta ‘fall’, falla ‘fall’, groa ‘heal’, harDna ‘harden, solidify’,
hlaupa ‘coagulate’, klofna ‘cleave, split’, kvikna ‘become lit’, rifna ‘becometorn’, rofna ‘break’, skrika ‘slip’, storkna ‘coagulate’, . . .
Change of state verbs which stand in contrast to (30) are those given in (31). Asbriefly mentioned earlier, these verbs permit the PR reading as their default inter-pretation,13 although they allow both vera and hafa formally. A verb like daga‘dawn’ illustrates a case in point, as shown in (32).

(31) batna ‘become better’, daga ‘dawn, become light’, gisna ‘become thin’, grænka
‘become green’, gulna ‘become yellow’, hitna ‘become warm’, hvıtna ‘becomewhite’, kolna ‘become cool’, kvolda ‘become evening’, slakkna ‘become loose’,slokkna ‘come to be extinguished’, sofna ‘fall asleep’, vakna ‘become awake’,versna ‘become worse’, vora ‘become spring’, æagna ‘become silent’, . . .
(32) aD hefur/er dagaD.
it has/is dawned ‘It (has/is) dawned’
It is important to note that there is a subtle meaning difference between the twoalternatives in (32); hafa focuses more on the process of dawning which finally leadsto the resultant state, while vera focuses merely on the resultant state without pin-pointing the process.14 This difference is substantiated by observing the compat-ibility of a resultative adverb alveg ‘completely’ which can only figure in the vera-sentence (33).

(33)
a. Nu er alveg dagaD. now is completely dawn ‘Now it (is) completely dawn’
b.
*Nu hefur alveg dagaD. now has completely dawned
One crucial difference between the classes of verbs in (30) and (31) is that most ofthe verbs in (30) permit alveg freely in both vera- and hafa-sentences, as in (34a) and

13 By default we mean cases without adverbial modification. Thus, example (32) can have an experi-

ential reading when the sentence is modified by particular adverbial expressions which facilitate the EP

reading, as in aD hefur alltaf dagaD fyrr ı agust en ı desember a Islandi ‘it has always dawned earlier in

August than in December in Iceland’ where alltaf ‘always’ and fyrr ı agust en ı desember a Islandi ‘earlier

in August than in December’ seem to facilitate the EP interpretation. The delineation of the behavior of

adverbials such as these goes beyond the scope of our present study; suffice it to say, however, that the

possibility of EP with the addition of adverbials shows us that the constructional meaning is not the only

explanation for auxiliary selection but that the composition of the sentence should also be taken into

account.14 Note that, as mentioned earlier in (12), the fact that vera does not permit durational expressions such

as ı manuD ‘for a month’ is in conformity with this observation.


(34b), indicating that the process component is not encoded in a verb like brotna, incontrast to daga.

(34)
a. Vasinn er alveg brotnaDur. vase is completely broken ‘The vase (is) broken completely’
b.
Vasinn hefur alveg brotnaD. vase has completely broken ‘The vase (has) broken completely’
What we have rather loosely called ‘process’ can be illuminated by making referenceto the notion of the open-ended change of state, specifically when we observe themeaning attached to hafa with durative time expressions such as ı manuD ‘for a month’.Notice that what (35a) describes is the situation which has become better and thisresultant state has been lasting for a month; that is, the duration of 1 month refers to themaintained state of the situation being better, but not to the continuous process ofbecoming better. It is important to remark that (35a) also implies that the situationcould get even better after more time. Put differently, we can say that what verbs in (31)share semantically is that they do not clearly encode the end boundary of a change event.

(35)
a. AstandiD hefur batnaD ı manuD. situation.the has become better for a month ‘The situation (has) become better for a month’
b.
*AstandiD hefur alveg batnaD. situation.the has completely become better
The incompatibility of alveg in (35b) also reinforces this view that the final endpointof a change of state has not been fixed. It is Dowty (1979), following the insights ofSapir (1949) and Bolinger (1972), who suggests the notion of degree achievements tocharacterize change of state verbs such as cool, sink, or age in contrast to verbs suchas break. This type of verb is characteristic in that such verbs are compatible withdurational adverbials such as for ten minutes, though they also express change ofstate. Consider (36) and its Icelandic alternative (37).15

(36)
The soup cooled for ten minutes. (37) Supan kolnaDi ı tıu mınutur.
soup.the
cooled for ten minutes ‘The soup cooled for ten minutes’
15 Note that the verbs in (31) do not always behave in exactly the same way as kolna. For example, not

all verbs accept a durational expression when they appear in the past tense form. Our concern in this

paper is their compatibility with a durational adverbial in a hafa-sentence, and, hence, this behavioral

difference is beyond the scope of our paper.


The conclusion drawn by Dowty (1979, p. 88) is that the meanings of these verbs arevague in the sense that they are determined ‘‘relative to some agreed-upon standardof comparison or some particular context of use’’. More precisely, their exactmeanings are not settled in their own right. Our interpretation of his insight is thatthere are verbs whose final endpoint is open to some external criterion or judgment,which rests, we argue, largely on the role of the speaker. Note that this point of viewcan explain efficiently why verbs in (31) are infelicitous with alveg but felicitous witha durational adverbial, whilst verbs in (30) are compatible with alveg but do notaccept a durational adverbial. In the next section we will show that it is this open-ended change of state meaning that allows the speaker to become involved in thesituation as a commentator.

3.4.2. Two different roles of the speakerConsider the following examples.16

(38)
a. AstandiD hefur batnaD fyrir mig. situation.the has become.better for me ‘The situation (has) become better for me’
b.
AstandiD hefur batnaD fyrir mig en ekki situation.the has become.better for me but not fyrir hann. for him ‘The situation (has) become better for me but not for him’
(39)
*BrauDiD hefur harDnaD fyrir mig. bread.the has hardened for me ‘The bread (has) hardened for me’
Most of the verbs in (31) can figure in a syntactic pattern like ‘Something has X forme’ (where X referring to the past participle) to portray the speaker’s opinion aboutthe situation. The grammaticality of (38) indicates that the judgment about theimprovement of the situation depends on how the speaker conceives it. In otherwords, the speaker serves as a commentator who observes the situation. Example(38b) makes it clear that the speaker’s commitment is an important factor in that thedevelopment of the situation is determined from my subjective point of view but notfrom that of others. By contrast, the fact that harDna ‘harden’, which is classifiedinto (30), cannot appear in the same syntactic pattern, as in (39), indicates that anevent such as the hardening of bread does not involve the speaker’s perspective. Thespeaker serves simply as someone who describes a situation that arises as a natural

16 We shall make use of examples with hafa to demonstrate the commitment of the speaker as a trig-

gering factor for the PR interpretation. Hence, though we do not demonstrate vera-sentences for the

economy of presentation, grammaticality with hafa implies the validity of PR in corresponding sentences

with vera.


consequence. Thus, the possibility of the PR reading of examples (38) is attributedto the role of the speaker as a commentator.Another piece of data that corroborates the two roles of the speaker we are sug-

gesting is the behavior of a verb like kvolda ‘become evening’, which is compatiblewith the adverbial expression til hatıDarinnar ‘to the party’. Note that verbs such asbresta ‘crack’ do not figure in the same syntactic frame, as illustrated by the contrastbetween (40) and (41). What sentence (40) denotes is that it has become eveningsufficiently for holding the party. That is, the perception of becoming eveningdepends on when the speaker thinks the party begins. The ungrammaticality in (41)indicates that the occurrence of cracking does not function in the same way as thatof becoming evening, although it might be possible to conceptualize a scene in whichthe cracking of glass identifies the start of the party.

(40)
aD hefur kvoldaD til hatıDarinnar. it has become evening to party.the ‘It (is) become dark for the party’
(41)
*GlasiD hefur brostiD til hatıDarinnar. glass.the has cracked to party.the ‘The glass (is) cracked for the party’
The contrasts shown above demonstrate that the speaker commits himself differ-ently to the change of state situation and this different behavior neatly reflects thetwo classes of verbs represented in (30) and (31) at the outset of our discussion.What we can suggest from these examples is that the speaker becomes involved inthe situation when it contains a gradual, but not a punctual, change without speci-fying semantically its beginning or end in any definitive manner. Put differently, it isobvious that it is this vagueness in the change of state that allows the speaker toassume the role of deciding on the end boundary.

3.4.3. Explaining the exclusion of EPWe have established the claim that change verbs, as listed in (30), and change

verbs, as listed in (31), differ semantically in that the latter group makes the finalstate of a change open-ended. One final point to be clarified is why EP must beexcluded from sentences where change verbs like batna ‘become better’, daga ‘dawn’,or kvolda ‘become evening’ appear. One explanation might be that the concept ofpast experience, anchored to EP, is taken as distant from the speaker as a referencepoint and, hence, it does not bear relevance at the present point of utterance (seeSection 2.1). Taken this way, it is indeed true that in the expression of experience,there is no room for the speaker to get committed to the past event. That is, EPrefers to an experience in the past which is merely observed, but not committed to,by the speaker at the point of utterance. The view that hafa and vera when appearingwith batna, daga, or kvolda create a unity and express a sequence of a single eventreinforces our assumption that these verbs with hafa do not point to past events,which are generally seen to be detached from the present time (Dowty, 1979,


pp. 341–342). In addition, the claim that the key conceptual property associatedwith verbs in (31) is the open-ended change of state, a meaning component whichinevitably leaves the final endpoint open to external judgment, serves to place thespeaker in right position. We argue that the PR reading with change verbs in (31) istriggered in conjunction with this component of semantics that enables the speakerto view the scene subjectively and to determine its final boundary accordingly. Thus,it can be said that the semantics of the open-ended change of state subsumes hafawithin the semantic domain of vera, while EP, though anchored in unmarked casesto the majority of sentences with hafa, cannot or need not be assigned to verbs listedin (31) due to their strong anchorage of the speaker’s subjective commitment.17 Inshort, the PR reading with hafa results from the combinatory property of the open-ended semantics of the main verb and the speaker’s role as a commentator to definethe end boundary of the change event.

3.5. Speaker in context

The context-dependency of natural language has frequently been mentioned in theprevious literature and context has been seen as something that places limits on theinterpretation of language behavior (e.g. Jarvella and Klein, 1982, pp. 1–2). In thissection we draw attention to certain sets of verbs in Icelandic whose compatibilitywith the auxiliaries requires the consideration of contextual constraints. Forinstance, a verb like hosta ‘cough’ only allows hafa but it can have the readings ofEP and PR (42). This means that the selection of the meaning depends on the con-text given in the discourse. When the speaker is talking about Joa’s past experiencethat she, say, had a cold with a strong cough, then EP is chosen, while PR is selectedwhen the speaker is concerned with the present situation in which Joa still coughs or,alternatively, the speaker observes some trace of her coughing such as a husky voice.A similar interpretation is also available with the verb dansa ‘dance’ [see for example(20)]18.

(42)
Joa hefur/*er hostuD/hostaD. Joa has/is coughed ‘Joa (has) coughed’
17 We must remark that the open-endedness depends crucially on the context. The verb batna ‘become

better’ can be associated with EP when we talk about the disease, but not the situation, that has got better.

A sentence Veikin hefur alveg batnaD ‘The disease has become completely better’ has an EP reading and it

sounds awkward when the time expression such as ı manuD ‘for a month’ co-occurs. This shows us two

things: one is that a single verb batna behaves polysemously and the other is that the semantics of the

open-endedness has resulted not only from the verb meaning but also from our conceptual understanding

of the external world with respect to the designated event. In other words, there is a conceptual difference

between disease and situation when we are concerned with their degrees of improvement.18 Note that the possibility of dansa having the PR interpretation without the telic adverbial supports

our claim that the concept of the speaker is invested with a more meaningful function than a fixed

semantic criterion such as telicity.


(43)
Joa hefur/*er donsuD/dansaD. Joa has/is danced ‘Joa (has) danced’
Examples (42) and (43) indicate that the two-way semantic distinction such as EPand PR is not necessarily consistent with the formal distribution of hafa and vera.Rather, this distinction has a pragmatic aspect; it comes to be objectified by thespeaker’s point of view on the proposition expressed by a verb like hosta in the dis-course context. Of course, the role of the speaker with respect to the examples isslightly different from the roles proposed in Sections 3.1 and 3.2 in that the speakeris not merely functioning as place deixis, though all of the roles mentioned so far docontribute to the same criterion, namely, the speaker as an egocentric entity isresponsible for assigning an appropriate meaning, EP or PR, by viewing the sit-uation described by the auxiliary construction, in which he is located.

3.6. st-Verbs

Icelandic is rich in st-verbs. One morphological characteristic of this type of verbis that their past participle forms exist only in the neuter singular form. Sinceagreement in number and gender is only required when vera is selected, but not inthe case of hafa, the majority of st-verbs come to take hafa due to the lack of theadditional forms, as represented by (44).19 Exceptional cases are found where thesubject is a neuter singular noun such as skaftiD ‘shaft’, as illustrated in (45),whereby the agreement between subject and past participle is triggered, giving rise totwo alternative sentences to each of which two readings of EP and PR are assigned.

(44)
Logreglan hefur/*er nalgast police.FEM.SING has/is approach.NEUT.SING husiD. house ‘The police (have) approached the house’
(45)
a. SkaftiD hefur snuist ı holknum. shaft.NEUT.SING has turn.NEUT.SING in tube ‘The shaft (has) turned in the tube’
b.
SkaftiD er snuist ı holknum. shaft.NEUT.SING is turn.NEUT.SING in tube ‘The shaft (is) turned in the tube’
19 In fact, as mentioned by FriDjonsson (1989, p. 88), this morphosyntactic restriction is also found in

the passive construction, which requires the combination of vera and a past participle. The reason his

example is ungrammatical is that the verb forDast ‘avoid’ cannot agree with hun ‘she’ due to its lack of a

feminine form.

*Hun var forDust af honum ‘She was avoided by him’ [FriDjonsson, 1989, p. 88, (109 b)].


An interesting fact to be mentioned here is that a case like (44) is still open to bothEP and PR interpretations in much the same way as we saw in (42) and (43). Thediscourse context in which PR is chosen would be that the approach of the policehas direct relevance to the present situation; that is, the police are probably in thehouse at the time of the utterance, while EP would be chosen when someone talksabout a past event when the police approached the house and this event has nodirect reference to the present situation.The examples given above clearly indicate that although morphology restricts the

occurrence of auxiliaries (44), the semantics and pragmatics that underlie theoccurrence of hafa and vera are more firmly established. Our conclusion is, there-fore, that auxiliary selection in Icelandic involves two distinct but related mechan-isms; the assignment of EP and PR, on the one hand, and the speaker’s perspectiveon a given speech event, on the other.

4. Conclusion

In the preceding sections we have demonstrated with representative verbs extrac-ted from our collection of 274 verbs that two essential factors play a part in under-standing the behavior of the Icelandic auxiliaries hafa and vera; one is the semantics,EP and PR, associated with the construction, and the other is the relevance of thespeaker who serves as a reference point from which events expressed in the auxiliaryconstruction are interpreted. With the PR reading, the speaker is bound up with theresultant state brought about by the action which occurred in the recent past. Withthe EP reading, on the other hand, the situation described is perceived as remotefrom the speaker, who is unable to get involved in the previous activity, which ulti-mately excludes the role of the speaker as the author of an expressive medium. Thepaper devoted itself to the question of why and when PR comes to be realized,mostly with vera and occasionally with hafa, and the roles of the speaker have beenspotlighted as the core of our discussion.The fact that adverbial modifications pointing to different zones of spatial orien-

tation facilitate the occurrence of vera reinforces our claim that the speaker as apoint of reference commits himself in varying degrees to the proposition expressed.Manner adverbials such as vel ‘well’ and illa ‘badly’ are also shown to facilitate therole of the speaker as an estimator in some events. Two types of change of stateverbs are shown to behave differently in the semantics and pragmatics of auxiliaryselection, highlighting the fact that the open-endedness encoded in a set of change ofstate verbs such as batna ‘become better’, daga ‘dawn’ or kvolda ‘become evening’might allow the speaker to become involved in a given situation and to decideaccordingly the end boundary of a change event. As exemplified by verbs such ashosta ‘cough’ and dansa ‘dance’, in addition, the speaker is assigned the role of adecision-maker, utilizing the context efficiently for the semantic distinction betweenEP and PR.Assuming that the most relevant determination of Icelandic perfective auxiliaries

is the combination of the constructional meanings and the speaker’s point of view


on the scene, the fact that many intransitive verbs (e.g. synda ‘swim’, snjoa ‘snow’),which cannot allow vera on their own right, turn out to figure freely in the preterit(e.g. Jon synti ‘John swam’, aD snjoaDi ‘It snowed’) as well as with hafa (e.g. Jonhefur synt ‘John has swum’, aD hefur snjoaD ‘It has snowed’) points clearly to thedifferent functions of the vera-perfect on the one hand, and both the preterit andhafa-perfect on the other. This phenomenon serves as additional evidence that thespeaker is playing a role in the formation of the vera construction, imparting morerestrictions. The relevance of the speaker’s role might not be restricted to Icelandic,however. The English sentence I’ve seen him on Tuesday is said to convey thespeaker’s afterthoughts in a spoken context with the past time adverbial on Tuesday(Miller, 2000, p. 339, citing Comrie, 1985). It appears that the Icelandic and Englishperfect might share the same basic property in that the role of the speaker is inte-grated to construe the situation anchored to the present perfect.The present paper has dealt with one limited area of the large issue of the present

perfect in general, and we have taken the Icelandic perfect with a special focus onthe vera-perfect as the objective of our case study. It is widely agreed that the perfectconstructed with a copular BE is considered to be the resultative construction, dif-ferentiated semantically from the anterior construction (Bybee et al., 1994; Ned-jalkov, 1988), which expresses a state arising from the past event. The observationswe have arrived at in this paper are at bottom in conformity with this general claim,and the paper has also pointed out in passing that the view, which is widely held,that resultative constructions take telic verbs (Bybee and Dahl, 1989, p. 69) needs tobe modified in such a way that the resultant state is not necessarily triggered by theachievement of the endpoint of the event designated by the verb but largely by whatwe tentatively call the pragmatic force that the speaker utilizes or controls. AsMichaelis (1994, pp. 155–156) and Miller (2000, p. 350) suggest, while the presentperfect appears to signpost universal semantic properties in the grammar of naturallanguage such as ‘perfect of result’ or ‘experiential perfect’, what is more pertinent,we argue, is that decisive factors that license the perfect seem to be determinedwithin the system of a particular language. Against this background, it is the mannerin which the speaker’s fine-grained pragmatic commitments, along the lines pro-posed in this paper, enter into utterance making, that distinguishes the Icelandicperfect significantly from that of other languages. From this perspective, then, webelieve that our investigations can pave the way for further inspection of the presentperfect in Icelandic, particularly an elaboration of the hafa-perfect, which we haveconsidered in this analysis only in relation to the semantics of the experiential per-fect.

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The speaker and the perfective auxiliaries hafa and vera in Icelandic

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