Perfect markers: Exploring desiderata for the semantics of the Perfect in Greek

Abstract

The semantics of Parakimenos, the Perfect in Greek, has been a topic that has been studied extensively, but it is really hard to define due to its interchangeability with the Greek Aorist. Due to that, I introduce an approach, that could account for the semantics of Parakimenos by focusing on the markers that co-occur with it most frequently. At first, I conduct a corpus research with the markers that are considered to be found with Parakimenos. The findings suggest that the markers make up a scale with two extremes and a number of in-between values: some markers typically go Parakimenos, others typically go Aorist and yet others take up an in-between position. Moving on, I carry out a forced-choice native speaker experiment in which the above findings are replicated. At the end, I argue that this marker-based approach could be insightful in studying the Perfect cross-linguistically.