ABSTRACT
Chapter 4: Extending the Fragment
4.1 The Perfect Tenses
4.1.1 The Forms of the Perfect As part of the inflectional paradigm of each German verb, we find
the following analytic Perfect forms:
(1) Aux(Pres)-Perfect Participle Aux(Past)-Perfect Participle Aux(Inf) -Perfect Participle
er hat gesch1afen er hatte gesch1afen
er muss gesch1afen haben
(2) Aux(Fut) -Perfect Participle er wird gesch1afen haben
But Vater (1975) argues correctly that werden functi ons just as the other modal s semanti cally and shou1 d not be regarded as a future tense. We may therefore concentrate on the forms in (1). Not all
verbs use haben as the Perfect auxiliary; the alternative is sein, but the choice between the two has no temporal import. Moreover, there is no general way to predict the choice of auxiliary, either temporally or otherwise.I) For this reason, we will allow that the choice of auxiliary verb is lexically marked.
