The Inflected Auxiliary is Post-Posed in the Future and Conditional, but Pre Posed in the Perfect

The second problem raised by Nocentini is the post-position of the auxiliary, which contrasts with the pre-position of all other auxiliaries in the Romance languages. Fleischman suggests that this may be accounted for by the word order shift between Latin and the Romance languages: the future/conditional periphrases already existed and the word order had become fixed in the earlier, O(object) V(verb), phase of Latin, whereas the perfect periphrases emerged during the later VO phase.152 This proposal is rejected by Adams, on primarily chronological grounds, stating that “the periphrasis is not attested with a meaning approaching futurity until at least the time of Tertullian […] and in colloquial […] registers the infinitive was regularly placed after its defining verb […] long before the first attestation of the new future.”153 For Adams, not only is the chronology put forward by Fleischman insufficiently compelling in the light of the evidence, but “even if one were to make the (untenable) assumption that infinitive +habeoin a future sense came into use at the ‘OV stage of the language’, it would be necessary to explain why the order of the constituents remained fixed. In the case of other auxiliaries the basic order infinitive + auxiliary gradually gave way to the reverse order, and it would be odd if infinitive + habeo expressing futurity were immutable.”154 Instead, as has been mentioned above, Adams’s analysis of the word order is based on the development of the periphrasis from an infinitive-auxiliary word order, semantically marked for obligation and, ultimately, futurity.155 Fleischman’s proposal of OV-VO shift is also rejected by Joseph, on the similar grounds that “the

151 _{John E. Joseph, ‘Inflection and Periphrastic Structures in Romance’, in Studies in Romance} Linguistics, ed. by Carl Kirschner and Janet de Cesaris (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1989), pp. 195-208 (p. 199).

152_{Fleischman,Thought and Language, p. 119.} 153

Adams, p. 132.

154

Ibid., p. 134.

typological situation is too complex to fit neatly into an OV slot”.156 He suggests instead that that Colloquial Latin was organised according to a theme-rheme pattern:

scribere habeoand habeo scriptum are the two forms which follow this pattern. The word-orders scriptum habeo and habeo scribere would fall into a rheme-theme pattern, typologically inconsistent with the dominant theme-rheme order, and were therefore discarded.157

Fleischman’s analysis, and the rebuttals given above, are all rejected by Nocentini on various grounds of insufficiency. He points out that the shift in word order cannot be used to explain the changes, as the word order typology is a description of the word order itself, and has only descriptive, and not explanatory, power. Therefore, “sostenere che la sequenza V – Aus è coerente con l’ordine basico OV o che è stata generata da una struttura di base X →SpecX […] equivale ad enunciare una tautologia”.158 He also points out the weakness of Joseph’s idea of a theme-rheme arrangement, observing that the periphrasis is not a set of separate pieces of information, but that “si tratta di forme analitiche che hanno un valore funzionale d’insieme”.159 It is only Adams’s explanation that Nocentini does not discard out of hand, but while some of his criticisms, particularly those discounting the statistics presented by Adams, may not be apt, his alternative analysis of the data is equally valid.160

Nocentini puts forward an explanation of the word order of the future and conditional auxiliaries that is based on the interaction of prosodic factors and sentence position. He suggests: 156_{Joseph, p. 197.} 157 Ibid., pp. 200-1. 158_{Nocentini, p. 372.} 159_{Nocentini, p. 373.}

160 _{Adams’s statistical evidence is borne out by Bourova, who presents a similar analysis of the}

attestations of the periphrasis, noting that the order tends towards infinitive +HABEREfor the imperfect, andHABERE+ infinitive for the perfect and present tenses.

Viara Bourova, ‘À la recherche du ‘conditionnel latin’: les constructions ‘Infinitif+ forme dehabere’ examinées à partir d’un corpus électronique’, in Romanistische Korpuslinguistik II, ed. by Claus D Pusch, Johannes Kabatek and Wolfgang Raible (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2005), pp. 303-16, (p. 307).

nel proto-romanzo è esistita una fase in cui le forme perifrastiche del verbo ricorrevano secondo due varianti sequenziali, condizionate dalla posizione della frase; le forme con Aus posposto riccorrevano in posizione iniziale e le forme con Aus preposto in posizione interna o finale […] Questi contesti sono già sufficenti a garantire [al variante Inf-Aus] una frequenza tale da competere con le sequenze non iniziali.161

In the light of the third problem that Nocentini proposes for the synthesis of the future and the conditional, this solution may be more compelling than that of Adams, as it also explains the problem of prosodic shift. Adams’s analysis of marked word order signaling modal meaning cannot, however, necessarily be excluded as a factor in the sentence position of the auxiliary-infinitive word order.

The most recent, and indeed, most convincing hypothesis presented to account for the Infinitive + HABERE word order, is that of Bourova and Tasmowski, which includes elements of both Nocentini’s and Adams’s analyses.162 These confirm that in Late Latin there is no particular tendency towards the word order infinitive + HABERE. Their explanation suggests that the two word orders, particularly in initial position, are determined by the type of modality expressed. They agree with Nocentini that the periphrasis in sentence-initial position is linked to the order infinitive + HABERE, but

further suggest that this occurs in situations where the periphrasis has alethic, rather than deontic, modality. In this context,HABERE occurs in the non-focalised position,

acting as a clitic, which paves the way for fusion of the infinitive and HABERE. In

contrast, where the periphrasis takes on deontic modality,HABEREis acting as a verb

with a greater degree of independence than in the alethic periphrasis. It tends to occur in the focalised, periphrasis- and sentence-initial position which precludes the possibility of fusion. There is, therefore, a complex syntactico-semantic interplay that accounts for the word order of the synthetic Romance conditional.

161

Nocentini, pp. 381-2.

162

Viara Bourova and Liliane Tasmowski, ‘La préhistoire des futurs romans: Ordre des constituants et sémantique’,Cahiers Chronos, 19 (2007), 25-41.