When (not) to establish a new category

Abstract In this paper, we take stock of our linguistic tools to investigate potential markers of the perfect and ‘already’, and challenge the necessity of assuming the existence of the category of iamitives ( Olsson 2013 ). Iamitives are said to have a core meaning of change-of-state, similar to ‘already’, with an additional resultative meaning making it also similar to perfect aspect. We investigate several perfect/iamitive/‘already’ markers in Nafsan, Toqabaqita, Unua, Javanese, and Mandarin Chinese. We argue that characteristics that have been taken as evidence of iamitives can be explained by the interaction between the perfect/‘already’ and the following language-internal mechanisms: (a) aspectual coercion in languages with underspecified verbal aspect can explain the presence of the change-of-state meaning with perfect aspect; (b) paradigmatic blocking can explain the lack of some perfect functions of a given marker in a language; and (c) compatibility in meaning can explain certain overlaps between perfect and ‘already’.