(Anti-)Grammaticalization paths of Spanish venir ‘to come’ + past participle

Abstract

Spanish venir ‘to come’ + past participle (pp) has different meanings as outcomes, namely arrangement (viene envuelto lit. ‘comes wrapped’) and causation (viene causado lit. ‘comes caused’). Furthermore, and contrary to Italian venire + pp and, to a lesser extent, Romanian veni + pp, it lacks the passive auxiliary function. In this article we explain these two meanings in compositional terms and show that only the latter can be properly considered a new grammaticalization path, in that the former venir is a lexical verb and as such allows the very same range of meanings and combinations in Medieval Spanish that it allows today. In addition, we argue that venir + pp might be analyzed as an impersonal construction. Finally, our findings support previous research on the grammaticalization of COME as a passive auxiliary, according to which it develops out of an intermediate COME with a change of state meaning. In Spanish this in-between state occurred, but only in an extremely restricted way and it didn’t go beyond the 13th century.