Constructionalization at work: the emergence of the Latin progressive present participle / gerund construction

There is thus good evidence that the Latin progressive construction has successfully spread in the speech community, which confirms its analysis as a construction in its own right. The fact that the construction is particularly frequent in Christian texts and translations from the Bible may be influenced by Greek, as has traditionally been assumed, but it clearly cannot be considered the exclusive property of Ecclesiastic Latin (Amenta 2003, 146-148; Haverling 2010, 495-496).

General conclusion

In the present study, I have shown that the functional and formal properties of many instances of the Latin pattern [verb of existence/position/movement + present participle/ gerund] are very similar to those of the Romance progressive construction. In particular, the verbs of existence, position, and movement show signs of a desemanticized, decategorized, cliticized, and possibly eroded status, which causes them to be semantically and syntactically reanalyzed as grammatical markers of the progressive aspect. The shift of the verbs of existence, position, and movement from the status of the semantic and syntactic main verb to that of an auxiliary deprives them of their syntactic independency, which causes them to form a verbal periphrasis with the present participle or gerund, which, as for it, shifts from the status of the predicate of an adjunct clause to that of the semantic and syntactic main verb. However, the degree of grammaticalization of the verbs of position and movement is lower than that of the verbs of existence due to the persistence of (at least part of) their lexical source meaning (cf. Hopper 1991, 22).

Although the degree of grammaticalization of the verbs of existence, position, and movement is sufficiently high for the pattern [verb of existence/position/movement + present participle/gerund] to qualify as a construction in its own right, they do not have reached a maximal degree of grammaticalization within Latin. Consequently, the constructionalization of the progressive construction has not been completed within Latin, but only in the individual Romance languages. This might explain why the emergence of the progressive construction has not been investigated within the field of Latin linguistics.

The results of this paper are based on the qualitative analysis of a varied, but restricted number of Latin instances of the pattern [verb of existence/position/movement + present participle/gerund]. Hence it would be interesting to complete these results by means of a diachronic corpus study, whose quantitative results could give more insight into the functional and formal properties of the Latin progressive construction at the different stages of its constructionalization process.

gerund predicate latin present

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