The two perfects of North American Icelandic

Icelandic has two perfects: the common Germanic type with the auxiliary 'have' (the hafa-perfect) and the younger second type that consists of 'be finished' plus an infinitival complement (the búinn-perfect). The búinn-perfect mainly expresses the resultative reading and the universal reading, but the hafa-perfect can also express the existential reading. As English uses the same construction for all types, it is interesting to explore how speakers of North American Icelandic construct their perfect: whether they overgeneralize one type or use both kinds of the perfect. Preliminary results show that about two thirds of the heritage speakers used either of the two perfects, although only a fourth used both of them. More importantly, the pattern shown in Icelandic more or less holds as the existential perfect is almost solely represented by the hafa-perfect, whereas the búinn-perfect is rather chosen for resultatives. This confirms a lack of attrition with respect to the syntax-aspect mapping and indicates that the form-meaning pairings are quite solid. In fact, these heritage speakers show a more consistent use of the two perfects than young Icelanders in Iceland do today. This is in accordance with previous studies that show that the syntax-semantics interface is less vulnerable with bilingual speakers than, for instance, the syntax-pragmatics interface.