The Distribution of the ‘be’- and ‘have’- Perfect Forms in the Shetland Dialect Texts (a Chaos or a System?)
The Distribution of the ‘be’- and ‘have’- Perfect Forms in the Shetland Dialect Texts (a Chaos or a System?)

Summary/Abstract: In the Shetland dialect, the ‘to be’ and ‘to have’ Perfect constructions apparently correlate with one another as free variants irrespective of the transitivity/intransitivity of the lexical verb. A more abundant use of the ‘be’-Perfect in the local folklore than in other genres may suggest that the Shetland Perfect is subject to stylistic variation as well. A possibility of idiomatisation of several lexical verbs in the ‘be’- Perfect should not be ruled out. Regional variation may also affect the distribution of ‘be’/ ‘have’- forms as the texts originating in different islands of the Shetland archipelago manifest different frequency of such forms. However, the free or, in other words, linguistically unmotivated variation cannot be maintained in a system endlessly and there are two possible developments: 1) more obvious semantic or distributive differentiations may gradually begin to manifest themselves or 2) one of the variants may disappear totally.

• Details
• Contents