Perfect in swedish and lithuanian languages

This paper is based on Joan Bybee, Östen Dahl and other linguists’ insights about development patterns of perfect and applies contrastive and quantitative methods to compare domains where perfect is used in Swedish and Lithuanian languages. For this aim to be achieved Swedish sentences with the active form of present perfect from four literary works and their translations into Lithuanian language were analyzed. Perfect from Swedish to Lithuanian language was translated not only with perfect, but also with preterit, participle, present or was paraphrased. Also, cases of perfect use were analyzed according to semantic types, which were distinguished in literature and adverbials of time, which were used together with perfect. On the basis of this analysis it was attempted to figure out which semantic types of perfect are represented in both languages and in which domains Swedish and Lithuanian perfects have similarities as well as where they differ. It was found that perfect in Swedish language is more grammaticalized and reflects later development stage than perfect in Lithuanian language