Gran bé vos ha vengut: construccions existencials i selecció de l'auxiliar en català antic

Abstract

This article studies auxiliary selection in Old Catalan starting from the hypothesis that unaccusativity is not a property of verbs, but of constructions, which is not to say that certain verbal roots do not tend to associate with structures that favour cooccurrence with one particular auxiliary. We provide diachronic data that show that verbs considered to be typically unaccusative, like venir, apart from being very common in resultative constructions, which select ésser in medieval Catalan, but can also be inserted into eventive constructions with an indefinite theme, which select haver («los à vengut gran dan a lur molí»). These structures are connected with an existential expression that uses haver-hi, frequent in the language of the Chancellery, which included a predicate containing the past participle of verbs considered to be typically unaccusative («d'altres hòmens que hi havia venguts»). It is not until the sixteenth century that haver is gradually introduced into resultatives.