Butt. Miriam, 1997 `Interfaces as the Locus of Historical Change'. In M. Butt and
T.H. King (Eds.) Proceedings of the LFG97 Conference, University of
California, San Diego. CSLI Publications. See
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/publications/LFG2/lfg97.html
Here, I explored the origin of the "aspectual" complex predicates and traced them back to (based on Hook 1991) adverbial participle constructions formed with -tva in Sanskrit. These constructions still exist side by side with the complex predicates in modern Urdu/Hindi and Bengali and are now formed with kar and the perfect form of the verb, respectively. In the first part of the paper, I chart the proposed path of change from Sanskrit down to the current forms. In the second part of the paper, I propose that the historical change be viewed in terms of event structure in that the emergence of complex predicates should be understood in terms of a progressive bleaching of a predicate's event structure.