11 Verbal periphrases in Romance: Structures, functions, and theoretical perspectives

Recent decades have seen a growing interest in the study of verbal periphrases in Romance languages such as in French aller ‘go’ + inf, Galician levar ‘carry’ + ger, Italian venire ‘come’ + ger, Romanian a fi pe cale ‘be about to (do something)’ + inf, Portuguese ficar a ‘remain at’ + inf (Squartini 1998; Pusch and Wesch 2003; Olbertz 2002, 2008; Garachana Camarero 2017a/b, 2020a; Bres and Labeau 2018; Garachana Camarero, Montserrat, and Pusch 2022; Garachana Camarero and Artigas 2024a/b; Pahontu Serafino 2021; Sentí in press, a.o.). Indeed, from a typological perspective, Romance languages have particularly exploited the combination of two or more verbal forms to express various temporal, aspectual, or modal meanings. These verbal constructions are much more productive, in terms of frequency and variability, in Romance languages than in other languages such as English. Consequently, linguists have devoted greater attention to these constructions in Romance languages, where the combination of an auxiliary and a main verb allows for the grammatical expression of subtle meaning distinctions that would otherwise require lexical means. At the synchronic level, the study of these constructions has been carried out mainly from a descriptive perspective, to establish their formal and functional profiles more precisely. Likewise, focus has been put on the very concept of verbal ‘periphrasis’ and on the limits that can be drawn with respect to other linguistic phenomena such as causative constructions and serial verbs (Fontanella de Weinberg 1970; García Fernández, Carrasco Gutiérrez, and Martínez Atienza 2006; Carrasco Gutiérrez 2008, a.o.). Indeed, even the designation of ‘periphrasis’ has been questioned, as it is considered too vague. Given that it has been applied to many different phenomena, the term periphrasis ended up being rather uninformative (Haspelmath 2000) or too restrictive to encompass all the constructions that combine an auxiliary verb and a main verb. The discussion regarding the limits of this category has been particularly relevant within the field of Spanish linguistics (Fontanella de Weinberg 1970; Gómez Torrego 1988, 1999; Olbertz 1998; Fernández de Castro 1999; García Fernández 2006). In fact, the question of which constructions can be considered periphrases has been a widely debated issue in the field. The extensive number of verbal periphrases used in this language, coupled with a long tradition of studies that typically began by verifying whether the studied constructions complied with the ‘criteria or requirements of a periphrasis’, has led to a long debate about the category’s boundaries. As this publication will integrate different grammatical traditions and analyses of diverse languages, it also sheds light on these debates. At the same time, the deeper discussion on the Spanish linguistics tradition is also productive for the analysis of verbal periphrases in other Romance languages. Against this background, this volume addresses the general question of which are the basic (formal and semantic) features of verbal periphrases in Romance that determine the inclusion of a combination of verb forms in this category. The objective is to undertake the description of verbal periphrases in Romance and further integrate results from different theoretical and methodological perspectives and linguistic traditions to arrive at new conclusions about this highly interesting category, traditionally defined as a linguistic configuration where two verbal elements are combined to form a single verbal unit.