Article published In:
DiachronicaVol. 28:2 (2011) ► pp.143–185
Rethinking the genesis of the Romance periphrastic perfect
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
Cited by 7 other publications
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2022. Interface phenomena and language change. In Language Change at the Interfaces [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 275], ► pp. 1 ff. 
Coussé, Evie
de Acosta, Diego
2013. The Old EnglishHave-Perfect and Its Congeners. Journal of English Linguistics 41:1 ► pp. 33 ff.
Hertzenberg, Mari Johanne
2015. Habere + pp and the Origin of the Periphrastic Perfect. Journal of Latin Linguistics 14:1
Pieroni, Silvia
2016. Habeo plus perfect participle in Cicero. Pallas :102 ► pp. 127 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.
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