The Continuous Path of Grammaticalization in Modern Peninsular Spanish

Haber + past participle (PP) is an example of a resultative construction that evolved into a perfect form, known as the present perfect. This form derived from the Latin periphrastic perfect, which was “a possessive construction consisting of transitive habere followed by a direct object and agreeing past passive participle ” (Lopez-Couso & Seoane 2008: 135-136). It was originally used similarly to tener + PP, which in modern peninsular Spanish may signify the present result of a past action (Harre 1991; Kato 1993), and also shared the same formal characteristics as tener + PP. Furthermore, this construction has grammaticalized as the default past perfective in the peninsular variety of Spanish (Schwenter & Torres Cacoullos 2008), following the perfect to perfective path of grammaticalization (Bybee et al. 1994; Squartini & Bertinetto 2000). The current study considers whether tener + PP is following the same evolution as haber + PP by diachronically extending into the realm of the perfect. 550 tokens of tener + PP and 1083 of haber + PP were extracted from the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA). All tokens were coded for several variables in order to determine if tener + PP expresses any of the four primary uses of the perfect (Dahl 1985:132, Comrie 1976: 56-61). The data were then analyzed using the statistical program Goldvarb X. Results indicate that tener + PP remains principally a resultative form, as it most frequently occurs with severa