ABSTRACT
A recurrent observation in works dealing with the evolution of Romance languages from Latin is that inflection is richer in the latter than in the former, since many Latin inflectional categories were lost in the daughter languages, conveyed instead by periphrastic mechanisms. This typological change has often been described as an “analytical tendency” of the Romance languages, a somewhat teleological notion that seeks to capture the fact that much of the grammatical information conveyed in Latin by morphological methods is expressed outside word limits in Romance languages. Grammaticalization is defined as “a process by which a lexical form or construction, in specific pragmatic and morphosyntactic contexts, assumes a grammatical function or by which an already-grammatical form or construction, in specific contexts, acquires an even more grammatical one”. The example of grammaticalization addressed involves the creation of verbal periphrases that convey the anterior tenses.
