Perfect

The title of this article is ambiguous. Further meanings are listed under Perfect (disambiguation) .

The term perfect ( Latin [tempus praeteritum] perfectum , 'completely past time' ) is a grammatical term that can denote an aspect or a tense of a verb .

The perfect as a verbal aspect belongs to the family of perfective aspects ; however, extensions in the direction of a tense of the past are also typical .

It was reconstructed for Urindo-European as one of the three aspects that exist there, which represent the most important verbal category in Proto -Indo-European . The aspects are still completely preserved in ancient Greek , but still very prominent in modern Greek . The ancient Italian languages, and thus Latin as well, see the perfect as a tense; here the aorist has coincided with the perfect in the historical development .

The perfect in German

→ Main article : Perfect in German

In German , the perfect is ambiguous between a more aspectual and a temporal interpretation. The Duden grammar from 2005 therefore recommends the more neutral term 2. past . In addition, it is also called the perfect present in German grammar , for example by Johann Christian August Heyse in 1827 .

The perfect tense in German is analytically formed from the personal form of the auxiliary verbs “haben” or “sein” in the present tense and the past participle of the expressive verb. As a prematurity tense in relation to the present tense, it expresses what happened before, but in the German dialects south of the Main and increasingly in everyday language it is used as a substitute for the past tense to express completed actions (see Upper German past tense shrinkage ).

Web links

Wiktionary: Perfect  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

1. ^ Östen Dahl, Viveka Velupillai: The Perfect. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig 2013 ( http://wals.info/chapter/68 , accessed April 15, 2014).
2. ↑ cf. Carlos Quiles Casas, Fernando López-Menchero Díez: A Grammar of Modern Indo-European. Second Edition: Language and Culture, Writing System and Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Texts and Dictionary, Version 4.15, 2009, pp. 193–195 ( Indo-European grammar, accessed on March 8, 2011 ( Memento of the original of April 14, 2011 in Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ) 
3. ↑ cf. Eduard Bornemann, Ernst Risch: Greek grammar. 2nd Edition. Braunschweig 2009, pp. 75f., 213-228.
4. ^ Gerhard Meiser: Veni, Vidi, Vici - the prehistory of the Latin perfect system (Zetemata 113). Munich 2003.
5. ^ Hans Rubenbauer, JB Hofmann, R. Heine: Latin grammar. Munich, (12) 1995, p. 67.
6. ↑ Duden - The grammar. 7th edition. 2005, ISBN 3-411-04047-5 , Rn. 706
7. ^ Johann Christian August Heyse: Theoretical-practical German grammar . 4th edition. Hahn, Hanover 1827, p. 414.
8. ^ Anne-Françoise Ehrhard: The grammar of Johann Christian Heyse: Continuity and change in the relationship between general grammar and school grammar (1814-1914) . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1998 ,. P. 126.