Origin and development of Spanish verbal periphrases haber + (nexus) + infinitive

Abstract

It is a well attested fact that possessive verbs spread to di!erent meanings. In many languages, these lexical verbs often lead to auxiliary and semiauxiliary verbs. This is the case of Lat. 'HABEO', and its Romance descendants, that gave rises to di!erent periphrastic constructions whose meaning goes from a past and a future tense to a deontic modality. In this paper we re(ect on the formation in Medieval Spanish of the deontic verbal periphrases haber + (nexus) + infnitive, 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.