The perfect tenses in Spanish (XIV, XV and XVI centuries)

Abstract

The present manuscript is a presentation about the perfect tenses of the Spanish language during the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries and it aims to characterize the last period of the linguistic change that took place in the auxiliary verb of these tenses, namely, the displacement of the verb ser (‘to be’) as haber (‘to have’) gradually expanded and became the only auxiliary verb of the perfect tenses in Spanish.BR The data are based on the following sources: The chronicle of Pedro I (14<SUP>th</SUP> century), La Celestina (15<SUP>th</SUP> century), avariety of legal documents from the 15th century and Linguistic documents from the New Spain (16<SUP>th</SUP> century). The objectives of the presentation are the following: first, to make a review of what the different linguists have written about this linguistic change; we will see that there are syntactic and semantic proposals that characterize the participles used with one or another auxiliary. Second, to show a diachronic description of the last part of the coexistence ser / haber; here we will see how in these three centuries there was an acceleration of this process: ser was still very active as auxiliary verb during the XIV century and it almost disappear by the XVI century. Third, to analyze syntactically and semantically those verbs that took both auxiliaries, that is, those that maintained longer the auxiliary ser in order to characterize this linguistic change. As we will see, most of the verbs with the semantic property of location change and those which have exclusively the intransitive property were those that were accompanied by the auxiliary verb ser longer.