The grammaticalization of the have perfect in Dutch – a corpus study of contextual extension and semantic generalization

The article investigates the grammaticalization of the have perfect in Dutch by means of a corpus study of historical legal texts dating from the middle of the thirteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century. The focus of the investigation is on the gradual extension of the have + past participle construction in contexts that were not attested before. The study of the status of the subject, the direct object and the past participle in the corpus shows that the construction is increasingly used in a wider array of contexts. Moreover, the corpus search indicates that meaning components of the have + past participle construction are lost in the process of contextual extension. More specifically, the construction is increasingly used in the background of the discourse in order to expand on events that happened before the time of reference.