posted on 2019-08-19, 13:25authored byBozhil Hristov
<p>In
<i>Grammaticalising the Perfect and
Explanations of Language Change: </i>Have<i>-
and </i>Be<i>-Perfects in the History and
Structure of English and Bulgarian</i>, Bozhil Hristov investigates key aspects
of the verbal systems of two distantly related Indo-European languages, highlighting
similarities as well as crucial differences between them and seeking a unified
approach. </p>
<p>The book reassesses some
long-held notions and functionalist assumptions and shines the spotlight on
certain areas that have received less attention, such as the role of ambiguity
in actual usage. The detailed analysis of rich, contextualised material from a
selection of texts dovetails with large-scale corpus studies, complementing
their findings and enhancing our understanding of the phenomena. This monograph
thus presents a happy marriage of traditional philological techniques and
recent advances in theoretical linguistics and corpus work.</p>