Bridget Drinka is a Professor and former Chair of the Department of English at the University of Texas, San Antonio. She has taught at a number of universities worldwide, and has written extensively on Indo-European temporal-aspectual categories, cladistic models of language relationship, stratification as a mapping tool, the 'sacral stamp' of Greek, and on other topics related to her interest in Indo-European, historical, and socio-historical linguistics. She serves as President of the International Society for Historical Linguistics, and as Associate Editor of Folia Linguistica Historica.

• 1. Language contact in Europe: the periphrastic perfect through history; 2. Languages in contact, areal linguistics and the perfect; 3. The perfect as a category; 4. Sources of the perfect in Indo-European; 5. The periphrastic perfect in Greek; 6. The periphrastic perfect in Latin; 7. The Charlemagne sprachbund and the periphrastic perfects; 8. The core and peripheral features of romance languages; 9. The early development of the perfect in the Germanic languages; 10. The semantic shift of anterior to preterite; 11. The Balkan perfects: grammaticalization and contact; 12. Byzantium, orthodoxy, and old church Slavonic; 13. The l-perfect in North Slavic; 14. Updating the notion of sprachbund: new resultatives and the circum-Baltic 'stratified convergence zone'; 15. The have resultative in Slavic and Baltic; 16. Conclusions.