Possessive-resultative constructions and the elimination of participle agreement in Portuguese compound tenses

Abstract

The tendency to eliminate the agreement between the participle and the direct object in compound verbal tenses is a common historical process of the Romance languages on the Iberian Peninsula that developed at different points in time. While in Spanish the lack of agreement was practically mandatory in the 15th century, in Portuguese and Catalan the agreeing syntax was still in use during the same period. Today, Catalan still permits it, under determined syntactic conditions, while Spanish and Portuguese agree in not permitting it at all. These facts make us suppose that the elimination of the agreement must
have accelerated in Portuguese from the 15th century onwards. This article proposes an explanation as to why the spreading of the elimination of the agreement accelerates in Portuguese from the 15th century. Our argument is based on the fact that the functional extension of the verb ter, originally possessive, made the distinction between the possessive-resultative constructions and the compound verbal tenses necessary at a morphosyntactic level.