The have/be alternation in contemporary Faroese

Abstract

This paper investigates the status of the alternation in Faroese between have (hava) and be (vera) as auxiliaries combining with the past participle/supine. We present the results of two online questionnaire studies and argue that the data indicate that in Faroese the have/be alternation is an alternation of perfect auxiliaries, like in Danish but unlike the other Scandinavian languages, where be can only be used to convey resultant state.

Keywords:

• Faroese
• perfect
• resultative

Notes

¹ We would like to thank the organizers and participants at the 2016 University of Copenhagen workshop on Perfect Auxiliaries in the Languages of Europe for their feedback and stimulating discussion, and the two anonymous referees for this article, whose comments and suggestions were very helpful in improving it. All remaining errors are our responsibility.

² In some of the Scandinavian languages, including Faroese, be combines with an agreeing form of the past participle, while have combines with an invariant form, the supine.

³ From now on, when we refer simply to ‘the perfect’, as here, we intend this to cover both the experiential and perfect of result readings.

⁴ There is an important complication here, given the existence of present counterfactuals, where the antecedent may appear in the simple past. Thus, for example, the following, supplied by an anonymous referee (who provided the translation also), is grammatical in Icelandic:

This is plausibly the reading referred to in McFadden and Alexiadou (2010) as “present counterfactual of resultative state”. See Section 3.3.2 for some further discussion.

⁵ “Týðandi munur er á hjálpasagnorðunum ‘hava’, sum sigur frá eini hending, og ‘vera’, sum greiðir frá støðuni, værinum” [There is a significant difference between the auxiliary ‘have’ that denotes an event, and ‘be’ that says something about the situation or being in a situation.].

⁶ One pair with fara ‘go’ used it together with the preposition við ‘with,’ an idiomatic combination that has the interpretation ‘to treat (someone), to behave with respect (to someone)’. It is striking that even in this case, where there is no change of location/state or any other kind of telos involved, the overall preference was still for be. The equivalent idiom in Icelandic (fara með) can only be conjugated with have (thanks to an anonymous referee for underlining the relevance of the Faroese example and providing the comparative data from Icelandic).

⁷ As an anonymous referee points out, it is possible that some participants interpreted tvær ferðir as ‘two trips’ in this case (that is, the object of a transitive use of fara) rather than as ‘two times.’ This is an unfortunate potential confound for the sets using this particular verb, but it should be noted that the transitive use, like iteration, would be expected to favour the use of have.

⁸ This questionnaire also included items testing the effect of including a past adverbial in non-conditional, root clauses. As this does not bear so directly on the main question addressed in this paper, we do not present the results of this part of the questionnaire here.

⁹ When verbs like noyðast ‘need’ appear in the supine themselves, they are frequently followed by other supines, rather than infinitives, as in the consequent in the last two examples in the table. This use may vary dialectally (Henriksen 1991); even if this is so, however, it would affect conditions with have in the antecedent and those with be equally.

¹⁰ Encouragingly, it appears that adding past adverbials to the Icelandic examples mentioned earlier results in unacceptability (Höskuldur Thráinsson, Thórhallur Éythórsson, personal communication):

This is consistent with the view that Icelandic differs from Faroese in only allowing a “resultant state” interpretation for BE + past participle, and with the hypothesis that the inclusion of a past adverbial may exclude that reading.