Mapping the PERFECT via translation mining

Abstract

Semantic analyses of the PERFECT often defeat their own purpose: by restricting their attention to 'real' perfects (like the English one), they implicitly assume the PERFECT has predefined meanings and usages. We turn the tables and focus on form, using data extracted from multilingual parallel corpora to automatically generate semantic maps (Haspelmath, 1997) of the sequence 'HAVE/BE + past participle' in five European languages (German, English, Spanish, French, Dutch). This technique, which we dub Translation Mining, has been applied before in the lexical domain (Wälchli and Cysouw, 2012) but we showcase its application at the level of the grammar.