The Employment of habeo + Perfect Participle in Late Antique Tuscan Charters

Abstract

This article explores the use of the Latin periphrasis habeo þ perfect participle in early medieval Tuscan charters. After outlining the aims and theoretical background in § 1, § 2 introduces a corpus of 146 private charters (AD 713–800) from Tuscany and northern Latium, drawn from the Chartae Latinae Antiquiores and encoded in the LLDB, together with the corpus-driven methodological choices; a quantitative analysis on divergent spellings is then conducted in § 3. On this basis, § 4 offers a quantitative and functional overview of the 333 occurrences of habeo, distinguishing full possessive uses, support-verb constructions and other recurrent patterns. § 5 then focuses on the very small subset in which habeo combines with a perfect participle, analysing these contexts in detail in terms of morphosyntax, argument structure and interpretation, and discussing the possible shift from concrete possession to more resultative or perfect-like readings within the broader landscape of complex predicates in the charters. Finally, § 6 discusses how this localised documentary evidence can be related to current accounts of the emergence of periphrastic perfects in Latin and the Romance languages.