Comparison between the Perfect in the Dialects of the Prespa Lake Region and in Arbёreshё

Abstract

In this paper I compare the system of past tenses and, in particular, the perfect tense, in the Albanian dialect of the Prespa Lake region and in the Arbёreshё language found in Italy.
The Prespa region is now located in the territories of Albania, Greece and Macedonia, but historically it was not politically divided. Comparing the fate of the forms of the perfect tense in the center of the Balkan area (Prespa) and in its extreme periphery (Arbёreshё) we can notice a certain similarity in their development, but at the same time an essential difference in the rhythms of the processes of grammaticalisation. The tendencies toward the loss of indicative temporal meaning and the development of a modal meaning is present in both idioms; however, in the dialect of the Arbёreshё we see this process as already finished, with the forms of the possessive perfect no longer having the indicative meaning. In the dialect of Prespa this process is only in its beginning. The possessive perfect tense forms are used in the function of the resultative and experiential perfect, but a gradual shift towards the modal categories can also be noted. The perfect tense is used in all the evidential and admirative contexts. (The usual way of expressing the admirative meaning in Albanian, the inverted perfect of the “qenkam” type, has almost vanished in the dialect.)