The speaker and the perfective auxiliaries hafa and vera in Icelandic

Abstract

Icelandic has two auxiliary verbs, hafa 'have' and vera 'be', to express two types of perfectivity 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 and pragmatic perspectives with a special focus on vera. We argue that the most important factor in understanding the distinction between hafa and vera is that the perfect of result interpretation, encoded mostly in vera -sentences, arises in association with the speaker's different roles in speech events. We propose that the speaker is taken as a vantage point in the interpretation of vera-sentences and the resultant state is portrayed in accordance with his various involvements 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 auxiliary selection, are shown to play no decisive role in Icelandic. © 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.