TY - JOUR U1 - Zeitschriftenartikel, wissenschaftlich - begutachtet (reviewed) A1 - Seiler, Guido A1 - Weber, Thilo T1 - Reichenbach meets underspecification. A novel approach to the perfect-past-cycle in German (and elsewhere) JF - Journal of Historical Linguistics N2 - This paper investigates the long-term diachronic development of the perfect and preterite tenses in German and provides a novel analysis by supplementing Reichenbach’s (1947) classical theory of tense by the notion of underspecification. Based on a newly compiled parallel corpus spanning the entire documented history of German, we show that the development in question is cyclic: It starts out with only one tense form (preterite) compatible with both current relevance and narrative past readings in (early) Old High German and, via three intermediate stages, arrives at only one tense form again (perfect) compatible with the same readings in modern Upper German dialects. We propose that in order to capture all attested stages we must allow tenses to be unspecified for R (reference time), with R merely being inferred pragmatically. We then propose that the transitions between the different stages can be explained by the interplay between semantics and pragmatics. KW - tense KW - preterite KW - perfect KW - underspecification KW - German KW - Deutsch KW - Historische Sprachwissenschaft KW - Perfekt KW - Vergangenheitstempus KW - Korpus KW - Althochdeutsch KW - Mundart KW - Pragmatik KW - Semantik KW - Tempus KW - semantics KW - pragmatics Y1 - 2022 UN - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-109018 SN - 2210-2124 SS - 2210-2124 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.20002.sei DO - https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.20002.sei N1 - This is a postprint of an article that was published in "Journal of Historical Linguistics". The published article is under copyright of Benjamins. The publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use or reprint the material in any form. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.20002.sei VL - 12 IS - 1 SP - 108 EP - 166 PB - Benjamins CY - Amsterdam ER -