Chapter 15

“Have-less perfects” in Norwegian

The constructions I investigate in this paper can all be subsumed under the heading ‘have-omission’. This is also the traditional analysis, to assume an omission of a semantically superfluous auxiliary in these structures. A different perspective however, and one that I will advocate here, is that there was never an auxiliary there in the first place. From this perspective, the constructions thus do not lack a perfect auxiliary (as the term ‘have-omission’ dictates), but instead these constructions employ what only morphologically looks like a supine, i.e. an uninflected past participle, in a syntactic function where you would expect a different form (i.e. a preterit or an infinitive). Semantically these constructions display a modal reading; counterfactuality or irrealis, which I argue is conveyed by the supine-looking from itself, and a linguistic heritage from Old Norse. Their morphological, semantic, and syntactic traits suggest a common underlying explanation for these constructions, and instead of attributing these features to an invisible auxiliary, my explanation puts the emphasis on the contribution of the visible element, the “supine”.