Abstract

This article looks at the grammaticalization process of the Romance periphrasis habere + past participle, focusing on its first few stages. The object of the study is Sicilian/Calabrian, the Romance varieties considered the most archaic in this respect, in which the above periphrasis is only used to express current states resulting from past situations. However, the results of an empirical study on text corpora of medieval Sicilian and Calabrian disprove this claim, showing instead an extensive use of the periphrasis in the Middle Ages – with the resultative, continuative and experiential perfect functions typical of the compound perfect of numerous modern European languages. Consequently, the varieties under study have experienced a reverse process, having gradually replaced the compound perfect with a simple one. This result also challenges the unidirectionality principle of grammaticalization.