Speaker Ghosting, Demystification of Long Lived Puzzles and the Raison D’être of the Perfect: Anatomizing English and Balkansprachbund Data

Krasimir Kabakčiev

ISBN: 978-960-598-799-2, 162 pages

First published in 2026 by ATINER

Price: Paperback: 50€ (It includes Shipping and Handling)

Electronic copy: 30€

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	7
PREFACE	11
Why this book?	11
A surprising eye opener	13
On the terminological apparatus	14
SOT: sequence of tenses, on English material	14
The Perfect	15
TENSE	16
Tensed verb forms	16
Preterit	16
The Aorist and the Imperfect, historical notions; the Aorist and the Imperfect in Bulgarian	16
The Aorist and the Imperfect in Greek	17
MOOD (modality)	18
ASPECT	18
Vendlerian situations	19
Verkuyl’s aspect schemata	19
Verkuylian leaks	19
The article-aspect interplay	20
Verbal aspect	21
Chapter One	23
Compositional aspect and its role as underlying the novel understanding of the Perfect across languages	23
Compositional aspect: what is it and what does it have to do with the Perfect?	23
Default aspectual value of a sentence	27
Languages analysed in search of the essence and raison d’être of the Perfect	33
Chapter TWO	35
The English Sequence of Tenses (SOT) rule: a preliminary issue akin to the essence of the Perfect in and across languages – and another puzzle which also received a solution	35
What is the essence of the English SOT rule?	37
Two speakers in a single sentence simultaneously?	37
Cancelable and non-cancelable content	39
Backshift mood	42
Backshift mood as a structurally important device	44
Chapter Three	47
Speaker ghosting: an intriguing cross-language phenomenon found for the first time and described on Bulgarian data	47
Is it true that there is no SOT rule in Bulgarian?	49
Bulgarian features a Sequence of TAM rule	54
Chapter FOUR	63
Theoretical issues crying out to be resolved, preliminary notes on major linguistic categories: tense, aspect, the Perfect and in particular the English present Perfect	63
What is Tense? What is Aspect? What is Perfect?	63
Some more preliminary notes on the Perfect related to general categories such as tense and aspect	83
The English present Perfect and its raison d’être: a grammeme with no own semantics and with residual functions, among which the signaling of non-witnessing	85
Ultimately, what do the present Perfect and the preterit mean?	91
Witnessing, and an intricate question: exactly how witnessed is the Bulgarian witnessed form?	99
Is it really necessary to signify – or signal – witnessing in language?	101
Chapter Five	107
The Perfect as a grammatical device across languages with no semantic content of its own, used to counterbalance the impact of other grammatical entities; its raison d’être is the effectuation of cancelability	107
More on the Perfect versus the preterit in English	108
A comparison on what the Bulgarian and the Montenegrin Perfect do	109
Aspectologically the Perfect is “an empty bag” like the preterit	111
The Perfect is aspectologically an empty bag like the preterit, but it tends to imperfectivize	111
More on what the preterit and the Perfect do in English	113
Possible objections to the thesis that the Perfect in English is a cancelable form	116
Markers of boundedness across languages and similar interdependencies	118
Summary: many grammatical entities in a language either hang together or exist to make up for the absence of other grammatical entities	120
Chapter Six	123
The Perfect in the Balkansprachbund, three languages described by theoretical linguists and simultaneously native speakers: Montenegrin by Bulatović, Greek by Dimitrova, Turkish by Kutsarova	123
The Perfect in Montenegrin – and by extension in Serbian and BCMS in general; speaker ghosting on Montenegrin data – found soon after its discovery in Bulgarian	124
The Greek Perfect and its essence of a cancelability device as described by Dimitrova	126
Greek non-witnessed forms as exponents of the cancelability feature	128
Generally on the present Perfect in English, Bulgarian and Greek in Dimitrova’s thesis	128
The phenomenon of speaker ghosting and the cancelability feature of the Turkish -mIş forms as described by Kutsarova	132
More on the widely held view in Turkology about the difference between ‑mIş and ‑DI verb forms	135
The non-witnessed Turkish ‑mIş forms as exponents of cancelability versus the witnessed ‑DI forms	135
Final notes	137
Chapter Seven	139
Final notes on the entirely novel understanding of the Perfect and where it started from	139
Conclusion	140
References	143
Abbreviations	151
Index of terms	153
Index of authors	159