Perfect and Possessive Structures in Irish and Russian

The present article has two main objectives. First of, all it aims to introduce Slavonic data into the discussion of the Irish perfect. As the perfect is a category which is not often used by the literati who have been the only source of written evidence on language history for centuries, its development remains concealed to a considerable extent. This lack of diachronic data leads us to hypothetical reconstructions. The Russian literary and dialectal perfect forms may provide some evidence as to how a similar structure may have also developed in Irish. Certain explanations of the Russian form could thus be equally applicable to the making of the Irish perfect. Presenting these explanations and the ways of applying them to the Irish perfect forms the second objective of the article.