Waar zijn de Afrikaanse mutatieven gebleven?

Abstrakt

In Afrikaans, as in English, mutative verbs are no longer distinguished by a be-auxiliary in the perfect tense. A process spanning several centuries in the case of English was completed within a few decades in Afrikaans. In both cases the loss of the be-auxiliary may be attributed inter alia to a preference for marking the distinction between active and passive voice rather than marking a sub-group such as the mutatives, which already form a semantically distinct group. The triggers of the replacement of be by have are, however, different for the two languages. Whereas in Old English the functional load of be increased as a result of the loss of the auxiliary weorþan, word was retained in Afrikaans, but its imperfect form, werd, was lost in the context of the loss of almost the entire imperfect tense category in Afrikaans.