Habeo and Aveo: The Romance Future

1972 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 388-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. S. Gratwick

‘The sudden emergence of all the post-classical functions of habeo+Infinitive in Tertullian is very remarkable’, as Mr. Coleman has said in his important paper (p. 226) on the origin and development of this structure, so prominent in the formation of the Future and Conditional paradigms of the main Romance languages. The functions which he has in mind are all Prospective: he distinguishes meanings tangential, as he puts it, to Possibility, Obligation/Necessity, Futurity, and, for the past tenses of habeo, Futurity-in-the-Past and Conditioned Unreality (p. 217). In this he essentially follows received opinion, though there have been those who would also distinguish a meaning tangential to Volition. Mr. Coleman gives these short shrift (p. 217 n. 3, p. 219 n. 2). Whether rightly, the reader may judge from what follows.

Author(s):  
Luís Filipe Cunha

This paper deals with the main similarities and differences that arise between past and future tenses. In particular, we argue that, while the propositions associated with past tenses are completely settled and their truth-value can be evaluated at the speech time, the propositions described by future tenses cannot be seen as true or false at the utterance time since these linguistic forms are ramifying, in that they typically point to a variety of inertia histories or inertia worlds. Nevertheless, if we consider more closely some particular tenses in European Portuguese – namely the Pretérito Imperfeito (Imperfect) and the Pretérito Perfeito do Indicativo (simple past), as representatives of the past tenses, and the Futuro Simples (simple future) and the structure ir (‘go’) + Infinitive, as representatives of the future ones, we conclude that there are also some important parallels across the two temporal domains. We claim that both the Imperfeito and the Futuro Simples merely locate the situations in a past or future interval, respectively, and that the final interpretation of the sentences in which they occur is the result of the interaction of their temporal characteristics with aspectual and modal features. The Pretérito Perfeito and the structure ir (‘go’) + Infinitive, on the other hand, share the common property of imposing an additional temporal boundary beyond which the eventualities cannot take place; as a result, aspectual effects and modal readings are much more conditioned and pure temporal interpretations – both in the past and in the future – become greatly predominant.


Author(s):  
Gerhard Schaden

This article is devoted to the description of perfect tenses in Romance. Perfects can be described as verbal forms which place events in the past with respect to some point of reference, and indicate that the event has some special relevance at the point of reference ; in that, they are opposed to past tenses, which localize an event in the past with respect to the moment of utterance. Romance is an interesting language family with respect to perfect tenses, because it features a set of closely related constructions, descending almost all from the same diachronic source yet differing in interesting ways among each other. Romance also provides us with a lesson in the difficulty of clearly pinning down and stating a single, obvious and generally agreed upon criterion of defining a perfect.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 155
Author(s):  
Christopher D. Sams

The aim of this paper is to investigate the properties associated with unaccusativity and the selection of auxiliary verbs (AUX) in the perfect tenses of the modern Romance languages. The modern languages that have a split-AUX system (such as Italian and French) operate under a principle in which some intransitive verbs select the equivalent of to be as their AUX in the compound past tenses, and others select the equivalent of to have. In research I have conducted over the past decade in the Italian language classroom, Bentley and Eythórsson’s auxiliary selection hierarchy (ASH) is best suited to explain how L2 Italian learners acquire the ability to make the appropriate surface AUX selection.


Diacronia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodica Zafiu

This paper aims at demonstrating the explanatory advantages of the old hypothesis concerning the origins of the auxiliary of the Romanian analytic conditional (aș + infinitive) as deriving from the imperfect tense form of the verb (a) vrea ‘(to) want’ < *volere (< VELLE). The grammaticalization process, reconstructed through the comparison with the other Romance languages and by relating it to typical directions of the linguistic change, presupposes intermediary semantic phases (the future-in-the-past value, the hypothetical value which is mostly counter-factual), whose traces may be found in the first Romanian (translated) texts, but which have been generally considered a consequence of the simple loan translation from the language source. The uses of the conditional with a reduced auxiliary (aș, ai, etc. + infinitive) are related to those (co-occurring in the old texts) of the conditional with a recognisable auxiliary (vrea ‘wanted’ + infinitive), for which the value specific to the first grammaticalization stage is still strong—that of a future-in-the past. The text also puts forth an explanation for the atypical forms within the paradigm of the conditional auxiliary—aș(i), ar(ă)—through the overlap between the forms of the imperfect and the simple past of the verb (a) vrea ‘(to) want’.


1980 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 230-231
Author(s):  
MARCEL KINSBOURNE
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  

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