Periphrasis “estar + gerund”: process of grammaticalization in medieval Spanish

Verbal periphrases with gerund occupy a special place in the grammatical system of Spanish. These constructions are composed of an auxiliary verb in a conjugated form and a main verb in an impersonal form of gerund. Among them, the most frequent is the periphrasis “estar + gerund”. Thus, the study of the process of its grammaticalization in the medieval period of the Spanish language represents an exceptional interest. The relevance of the research is due to the absence of such an analysis based on the corpora of historical texts in studies on Ibero-Romance linguistics written in Russian. The materials of the study are the texts of the XII–XV centuries taken from the Spanish corpora El Corpus Diacrónico del Español (CORDE) and Corpus del Español: Genre / Historical. The methods of grammatical, semantic, and aspectual interpretation were used to analyse the found contexts. Several stages of grammatical and lexical expansion in the use of the studied construction are consistently considered. It was revealed that since the XIII century the periphrasis was actively introducing into the language system as a grammatically stable verb combination. Subsequently its lexical and grammatical compatibility was significantly expanded. By the XV century, grammaticalization reached its maximum and the periphrasis was already used in all possible tenses and moods, just as in modern language. It is important to note that most often in the medieval period under consideration, verbs semantically denoting perception and mental activity took the position of the main verb of the periphrasis. From an actional point of view, these are often stative verbs. Apparently, in order to combine with the stative verb estar, other verbs also needed to have stative characteristics. At present, on the contrary, stative verbs are the least frequent in the position of the main verb of the periphrasis under consideration, according to analysis of texts from the corpus of modern Spanish.

grammaticalization, historical corpora, periphrasis "estar + gerund", medieval Spanish