Evolution in language
evidence from the romance auxiliary
pp. 517-528
in: Jan Wind, Brunetto Chiarelli, Bernard Bichakjian, Alberto Nocentini, Abraham Jonker (eds), Language origin, Berlin, Springer, 1992Abstract
Far from being idiosyncratic or cyclical, the development of the Latin verb is characterized by a two-pronged evolution. The recently created auxiliary habeo "to have" has replaced sum "to be" as a temporal auxiliary. This substitution reflects the change from an aspect — to a tense — dominated verbal system. Moreover, the sequences verb + auxiliary element have been reversed: in contrast to Latin, the French morphological marker precedes the lexeme. This change is consistent with the evolution of syntactic and morphological structures from left- to right branching. Therefore, the development of the Romance verb is part of the unidirectional switch (1) from left- to right-branching structures and (2) from an aspect — based to a tense — based verb system. This two-pronged evolution characterizes the history of other Indo-European languages.