Spanish among the Romance languages ​​of the Iberian Peninsula: the history of the formation of compound tenses

Abstract

The aim of this present article is to contribute to the study of the evolution of compound tenses in Spanish by collocating it in the Iberian Romance context. We examined whether the process of the gradual decline of the participle agreement in transitive verbs and the use of the auxiliary ‘ser’ (be) in intransitive ones show parallelisms in the three representative Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula. The analysis of an old trilingual corpus consisting Catalan, Portuguese and Spanish texts shows that the Spanish ones, as early as the fifteenth century, show the innovation of not matching the participle and that it also maintains the use of ‘ser’ in the perfect of intransitive verbs, while the other two languages still preserve the state they had in the Middle Ages. The data indicates that the two processes are not strictly correlated and that Spanish overtook the neighboring peninsular languages only in the case of removing the concordance.