Appunti per una teoria unificata dell'ausiliarizzazione

Abstract

This article aims at discussing the premises for a unified account of auxiliarisation, here understood as a
specific subcase of grammaticalisation. The passage of Latin HABEO from a lexical verb to a tense-forming
auxiliary is certainly one of the most well-studied innovations of Romance languages. Equally familiar are the
cases of auxiliarisation of Latin TENEO, Germanic *habhen and *getan, as well as Scandinavian derivatives
of Old Norse fà. Such processes follow a similar path, in the sense that they originally select a secondary
predication in the passive voice, which over time is reanalysed as active. At the same time, the governing verb
is void of lexical content and turns into an auxiliary, while the implicit agent of the secondary predicate is
reinterpreted as the surface subject of the construction. If a unified theory is to be attempted, such an approach
should capture why such a path of change is consistently observed and, moreover, why it seems to be a defining
property of such auxiliarisation that the verbs involved originally describe possession, reception, or control.
Furthermore, ideally the unified theory should account for why the semantic output of these processes varies
over time: the earliest cases of auxiliarisation are precisely those involving HABEO/habhen, which give rise
to the compound tenses in modern languages. Subsequent cases, however, such as the auxiliarisation of
TENEO/getan etc. do not lead to the formation of compound tenses, but rather to what could be defined as
compound aspects or, sometimes, compound causative constructions. This circumstance, too, requires a
principled account.