Statività e modalità: i modi del perfetto

Abstract

In the earliest stages of Greek and Indo-Iranian languages, mood oppositions are extremely rare for the perfect. Some scholars suppose that they had disappeared by that time, while others suggest that they were originally absent because the perfect was part of those Aktionsarten, for which the expression of modality is lacking or very uncommon. With a number of parallels from Italian dialects and non Indo-European languages, this paper aims at demonstrating that the perfect was lacking modal categories from the beginning. The hypothesis is put forward that the modal categories neutralise the opposition between a stative and an eventive reading of the predicate, in favour of the representation of the event as a dynamic change of state, whose expression was part of the present-aorist system.