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(1992) Language origin, Dordrecht, Springer.
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.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-2039-7_27
Full citation:
Bauer, B. (1992)., Evolution in language: evidence from the romance auxiliary, in J. Wind, B. Chiarelli, B. Bichakjian, A. Nocentini & A. Jonker (eds.), Language origin, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 517-528.
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