Part of
From Verbal Periphrases to Complex PredicatesEdited by Mar Garachana Camarero, Sandra Montserrat Buendia and Claus Dieter Pusch
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 31] 2022
► pp. 131–148
It is a well attested fact that possessive verbs spread to different meanings. In many languages, these lexical verbs often lead to auxiliary and semi-auxiliary verbs. This is the case of Lat. habeo, and its Romance descendants, that gave rises to different periphrastic constructions whose meaning goes from a past and a future tense to a deontic modality.
In this paper we reflect on the formation in Medieval Spanish of the deontic verbal periphrases haber + (nexus) + infinitive, which added some discursive meanings related to the modality to a new grammatical form. The emergence of these verbal constructions gave rise to a major change in the medieval verbal system, whose sources can be found in Latin.