The rise and development of analytic perfects in Italo-Romance

This chapter discusses the rise of Latin esse ‘be’ and habere ‘have’ as active auxiliaries and the development of their reflexes as markers of split intransitivity in Italo-Romance, with reference to the spread of the auxiliary HAVE at the expense of BE in old Neapolitan, and the penetration of BE into the HAVE domains in some contemporary Campanian varieties. It is claimed that the emergence of Latin esse and habere as perfective auxiliaries is one of the outcomes of changes affecting the encoding of the argument structure of the clause in late Latin, and that the replacement of BE with HAVE in old Neapolitan, as well as the modern reintroduction of BE within the HAVE domains, are both sensitive to a gradient model of split intransitivity, though in a reverse way. It is also shown that the three changes under investigation appear to reflect language internal principles and follow an orderly progression as regards the cancellation and (re)introduction of an active coding system (through auxiliary choice).