Article published In: Diachronica
Vol. 28:2 (2011) ► pp.143–185
Rethinking the genesis of the Romance periphrastic perfect
Published online: 30 June 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.28.2.01dea
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.28.2.01dea
The Romance languages all display periphrastic perfects that can be traced to Latin [habere “have” + noun + perfect participle]. A new survey of the Latin corpus reveals that this string had three distinct structures and values. I argue that the likeliest source of the perfects is a periphrasis denoting the achievement of a result or a persisting resultant state. This implies that the relationship between possessive and auxiliary habere is more complex than previously supposed. Finally, I examine the range of values that this periphrasis takes across the Romance languages. I maintain that the growth of the perfect at the expense of the preterite followed an orderly pattern, with requirements on the temporal denotation of the perfect successively relaxed.
Keywords: auxiliary, possession, grammaticalization, Latin, Romance, perfect
Cited by (7)
Cited by seven other publications
Catasso, Nicholas, Marco Coniglio & Chiara De Bastiani
2022. Interface phenomena and language change. In Language Change at the Interfaces [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 275], ► pp. 1 ff.
Rosemeyer, Malte
2022. Anteriors and resultatives in Old Spanish. In From Verbal Periphrases to Complex Predicates [IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature, 31], ► pp. 149 ff.
Hertzenberg, Mari Johanne
Coussé, Evie
de Acosta, Diego
[no author supplied]
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