Grammatikalisierung von Auxiliaren und Copulae im Katalanischen der Decadència

Abstract

The Decadència (15th-18th centuries) is the least known period in the history of Catalan. Until recently there was a great lack of studies on the language of this period of time, especially with regard to internal history. However, the Catalan language was affected by important changes, especially within the verbal system (morphology and grammaticalizations in the cognitive domains "have" and "be"). These changes have caused the typological position of Catalan to move away from its Occitan sister language. With the example of the textual genre of personal diaries and memoirs that had a continuous tradition throughout the Decadència, I shown the development of these processes with quantitative results and with attempts at a qualitative interpretation. At the heart of the analysis are the grammaticalization of the Latin verbs tenere, stare, esse, habere, ambulare/vadere together with the concordance of the participle in the construction of the "indefinite perfect".