Variation of Be and Hae (Have) Auxiliaries in the Shet Land Perfect – a System or a Chaos?

One of the most peculiar grammatical features of the hybrid Shetland dialect is its system of perfect forms. It differs from the corresponding systems both in Standard English and in mainland Scots due to the fact that they consider the construction
‘be + Past Participle (transitive)’ to be ‘passive’, while in Shetlandic there is a grammatical homonym, which expresses the perfective meaning (‘A’m fön’ = I have found’). This study focuses on evaluating the real scale of the phenomenon in question mostly in written speech. It is also aimed at ascertaining the expediency of a wider research in order to determine a real place of the ‘be’-Perfect in the grammatical system of the Shetland dialect. Both types of the Perfect constructions (i.e. ‘be + Past Participle’ and ‘hae (have) + Past Participle’) apparently correlate with one another as free variants. The abundant use of the ‘be’-Perfect in the local
literature and folklore may also suggest that the Shetland perfect is subject to stylistic variation as well. Some of the lexical verbs seem to manifest an idiomatic usage with the ‘be’- auxiliary. Such a unique situation may prove to be quite stable, although in an indefinite historical perspective we may witness the victory of one of the two auxiliaries in the Shetland dialect.