Substrate, superstrate and universals: Perfect constructions in Irish English Peter Siemund Abstract As a contact variety Irish English possesses several grammatical properties for which it has turned out difficult to decide whether they were simply passed on from earlier stages of English or are due to influence from Irish. This so-called ‘substrate/superstrate debate’ is in the following evaluated from a cross-linguistic perspective with the result that at least for the domain of perfect constructions the superstrate derivation of Irish English should be considered the more plausible scenario. In addition, it is argued that those peculiarities of Irish English for which neither substrate analysis nor superstrate analysis is possible are especially relevant for cross-linguistic research. 1. Introduction 2. Tense and aspect in Irish English: Some important properties 3. The question of origin: Substrate versus superstrate 4. The relevance of cross-linguistic observations for the substrate/superstrate debate 5. Substrate, superstrate and the search for linguistic universals 6. Summary and conclusion 1. Introduction 1 As is well known, Irish English (IrE) has an impressive range of morphosyntactic peculiarities in the domains of tense and aspect, reflexivity, sentence structure, the noun phrase – to mention only a few, which distinguish this variety sharply from Standard English (StE). Most of these special properties have traditionally been subjected to two competing Siemund, Peter (2004) ‘Substrate, superstrate and universal. Perfect constructions in Irish English’, in: Bernd Kortmann (ed.) Dialectology meets Typology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 401-434.