The old high German source of the present day perfect: development of the semanhcs of the haben + past participle construction

The aim of the paper is to perform a syntactic and semantic analysis of the haben + participle II construction on the basis of the sample from the material pertaining to the Old High German period. The investigation employed the method of contextual analysis of the semantics of the verbs used as past participles in the construction as well as its syntactic environment. The novelty of the research is that it shows a detailed picture of mechanisms underlying semantic shifts of haben + participle II, which functioned as a resultative during the whole period and possessed a state-resultant semantics. At the starting point the construction embraced the syntactic pattern of the possessive verb and inflected past participle. Later, in the course of the semantic and collocational expansion of the possessive verb and further transformation of the past participle on the model of the predicative form of the adjective and the construction sin/wesan + participle II, the construction yielded the resultative of the second type with a short (uninflected) form of the participle. The second type of the resultative also retained a state-resultant semantics. In the text of Otfrid and to a larger extent in the works by Notker, it became possible to identify the subjective resultative. The main conclusion of the paper, which fits into the grammaticalization theory, is the statement that the key impetus for the change of haben + participle II, at different stages of its development during the Old High German period was a semantic shift in relations between constituents within the construction, which triggered its further morpho-syntactic transformations.