Latin-Romance habere: double function and lexical split

Abstract

In Modern Standard Italian, the verb avere < Lat. HABERE has two principal uses: either it means "to hold, to possess", or it serves äs an auxiliary in the formation of past tenses:(1) ha un libro "he has a book"(2) ha trovato un libro "he has found a book".But in current colloquial usage, all forms of avere with the function of (1) are freely and with increasing frequency preceded by [tS], the elided prevocalic form of ci [tsi], which, though derived from Lat. ecce hie "(see) here", conveys no local meaning in this context; hence (1) and (2) are now generally contrasted thus:(3) da [tsa] un libro "he has a book" (4) ha trovato un libro "he has found a book".One never says (5) *cia trovato un libro "he has found a book" in the sense of (2) or (4), although one may say (6) ci ha trovato un libro "he has found a book here (there)", in which case, however, ci has preserved its local meaning. While in this phrase ci ha must be spelled thus obligatorily, it mostly sounds like ciä of (3), although a pronunciation [täia], with the vowels in hiatus, is quite proper also.In fact, Italian orthography, on the whole fairly 'phonetic', has not solved the problem of an [i] which, having caused the palatalization of the preceding consonant but being normally elided in speech before a vowel, cannot be omitted in writing lest it call forth a non-palataüzed pronunciation. As regards the spelling of the elided version of ci ha (the h has no acoustic value whatever), c'ha or c'a would have to be read [ka], hence would be senseless; and c'ia is orthographically not permissible (nor, for that matter, intelligible to an Italian reader) because there is no word ia in the language. There remains only ciä. But since high-style Standard Italian not only disapproves of the forms with [ts] (see below) but also would not admit da äs a single word in its lexicon, both spelling and word are relegated to sub-standard usage 1 . Yet their employment 1 In the dialect stories that appear regularly on page 4 of the Roman daily newspaper II Messaggero under the title Awenture in citta, the customary l Zeitschrift f. rom. Phil. Bd. 94, Heft 1/2 Brought to you by |

Synchronic and Diachronic Approaches to Linguistic Variation and Change

“…The phenomenon is also found in many northern Italian dialects; see, for instance, De Marchi 1976:84 for the dialect of Parma, and Biolcati 1980:110 for the dialect of Ferrara. Pulgram (1978) remarks on a similar phenomenon in Roman dialect and in standard Italian; he makes the strong claim (ibid. :2) that 'current colloquial Italian has two verbs, ciavere and avere, which function typically and distinctively 9 as verb signifying possession and auxiliary, respectively.…”

En torno a 'haber'

“…La sustitución de haber por tener como verbo de posesión en la historia del español ha sido objeto de la atención de no pocos trabajos monográ cos desde, al menos, el artículo clásico de Seifert (1930) de hace casi un siglo. Los trabajos de Chevalier (1977), Pulgram (1978), Pountain (1985), Garachana (1994Garachana ( , 1997, García Gallarín (2002), Hernández Díaz (2006 o Del Barrio (2007) realizan un análisis exhaustivo de los contextos en los que tener va ganando terreno a haber en la expresión de las relaciones posesivas y proporcionan explicaciones dignas del mayor de los intereses. Una de las conclusiones más asentadas de estos trabajos es la interrelación que se establece entre la gramaticalización de haber como auxiliar de los tiempos compuestos y su consiguiente pérdida del signi cado posesivo y la escalada de tener como verbo sustituto.…”

Dating the Grammaticalization of the Spanish Clitic Pronoun

“…Certainly colloquial Jean ichante "John sings", where i-has practically lost its lexical, pronominal identity, points in that direction». For more on free to bound morphemes, see Pulgram (1963Pulgram ( ), (1967Pulgram ( ), and (1978b. 8 Of course, one could argue that at one intermediate synchronic state of Old Spanish the clitic is bound in no lo dixo types, but not in lo no dixo types.…”