2.4. Perfect forms. The category of time-correlation

Like other analytical forms of the verb, the Perfect forms have developed from OE verb phrases.

1) The main source of the perfect form was the OE “possessive” construction, consisting of the verb habban ‘have’, a direct object and participle II of a transitive verb, which served as an attribute to the object, e.g.

Hæfde sē oda cempan ecorene (Beowulf) (‘had that brave (man) warriors chosen’).

The meaning of the construction, which served as a compound nominal predicate in the sentence, was: a person (the subject) possessed a thing (the object), which was characterized by a certain state resulting from a previous action (the participle). The participle, like other attributes, agreed with the noun-object in number, gender and case.

Originally the verb habban was used only with participles of transitive verbs; then it came to be used with verbs taking genitival, datival and prepositional objects and even with intransitive verbs, which shows that it was developing into a kind of auxiliary, e.g.

For sefenn winnterr hafde he ben in Egypte (Ormulum) (‘for seven winters he had been in Egypt’).

2) The other source of the perfect forms was the OE phrase consisting of the link-verb bēon and participle II of intransitive verbs:

Nū is sē dæ cumen (Breowulf) (‘Now the day has (lit. “is”) come’)

Hwænne mīne daas āāne bēoþ (‘When my days are gone (when I die..)’.)

In these phrases the participle usually agreed with the subject.

In ME the two verb phrases turned into analytical forms and made up a single set of forms termed “perfect”. The participles had lost their forms of agreement with the noun (the subject – in the construction with ben, the object – in the construction with haven); the places of the object and the participle in the construction with haven changed: the participle usually stood close to the verb have and was followed by the object which referred now to the analytical form as a whole – instead of being governed by have. Compare the OE possessive construction quoted above with ME examples:

The holy blisful martyr for to seke,

That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke. (Chaucer)

(‘To seek the holy blissful martyr who has helped them when they were ill.’)

In this example the structure hath holpen is a simple verbal predicate. In the perfect form the auxiliary have had lost the meaning of possession and was used with all kinds of verbs, without restriction. Have was becoming a universal auxiliary, whereas the use of be grew more restricted.

By the age of the Literary Renaissance the perfect forms had spread to all the parts of the verb system.

In the beginning the main function of the perfect forms was to indicate a completed action, to express “perfectivity” rather than priority of one action to another and relevance for the subsequent situation (the meanings ascribed to the perfect forms today). For a long time the perfect forms were used as synonyms of the simple past. Towards the age of Shakespeare the contrast between the perfect and non-perfect forms became more obvious. In the main Shakespeare and his contemporaries employed the perfect forms in the same way as they are employed in present-day English.

Thus in the 17^th c. the meaning of “priority and relevance for the subsequent situation” became the domain of the perfect forms and the meaning of the non-perfect forms, particularly the past indefinite, was accordingly narrowed. It may be concluded that the category of time-correlation was established in the 17^th c.