BE vs. HAVE in the perfect of mutative intransitive verbs: A study on the Middle English translation of Paris and Vienne

Abstract

Unlike other European languages such as German or French, Present-day English has only a single form of the perfect: the combination of HAVE and a past participle. In earlier English, however, the auxiliary BE was also used with past participles of some intransitive verbs, particularly those classified as mutative intransitive verbs. Although the major shift to the HAVE-perfect occurred during the Late Modern English period, early occurrences of the HAVE-perfect with mutative intransitive verbs are known to have existed already in the Middle English period. This study investigates examples of BE- and HAVE-perfects extracted from the Middle English romance Paris and Vienne, which was translated from French and printed by William Caxton ( 1485 ) , and subsequently reprinted by Gheraert Leeu (1492). Our choice of this specific text is significant for two reasons: first, the time of its translation and printing coincides with the earliest stage of the shift towards the HAVE-perfect; second, the French source texts from which Caxton translated have been identified and are available for comparative linguistic analysis. This latter perspective makes our study unique, as relatively little research has explored potential influence from the source text on the choice of perfect forms. The distribution of BE- and HAVE-perfect forms in the text revealed patterns largely consistent with existing literature: approximately 80% used BE and 20% used HAVE. The instances of the HAVE-perfect tend to exhibit features previously identified in existing studies. Furthermore, a parallel examination of the English and French texts uncovered certain translation patterns in Caxton's work.