Perfect Forms

Like other analytical forms of the verb, perfect forms developed from free syntactic combinations of: habban + past participle of a transitive verb and bēon + past participle of an intransitive verb.

The main source of the perfect forms was the OE «possessive construction», consisting of the verb habban (have), a direct object and past participle of a transitive verb, which served as attribute to the object, e.g. Hæfde sē ʒoda cempan ʒecorene (Beowulf) (literally: Had that brave (man) warriors chosen).

The other source of the perfect forms was the OE phrase, consisting of the link verb bēon and past participle of an intransitive verb, e.g. Nū is the day cumen (Beowulf) (Now the day has (literally is) come).

The past participle, like other attributes, agreed with the noun (the subject - in the construction with bēon and the object – in the construction with habban) in number, gender and case, e.g. Hwæne mīne daʒas āʒāne bēoþ (Ælfric) (when my days are gone = when I die) Here the past participle āʒāne agrees with the subject in case and number (nominative, plural).

Towards ME the past participle lost its forms of agreement with the noun, the verb «have» lost the meaning of possession and was used with all kinds of verbs without restriction, which shows that it was developing into a universal auxiliary, whereas the use of «be» grew restricted. Shakespeare employs «be» mainly with the verbs of motion, but even with these verbs «be» alternates with «have», e.g. He is not yet arrived… On a modern pace I have since arrived but hither.

The modern phrase «to be gone» (The snow is gone) goes back to the perfect forms with be.

The verb phrases with haven developed into two different directions. (1) In most cases the object and past participle changed their places: the participle came after «have» and was followed by the object, which referred now to the analytical form as a whole, e.g. He hath to hem declared his entente (Chaucer) (He has declared his intention to them) (2) The verb phrase retained the original word order.

The modern predicative construction with passive subject of the type He had his watch repaired descends from the prototype of perfect forms.

At first, perfect forms seem to have denoted a completed action. Nowadays they denote anteriority (the action that took place before a time either mentioned or understood).

The opposition perfect – non-perfect created a new grammatical category, which Prof.A.I. Smirnitsky proposed to call category of «time correlation».

The new category established itself in the XVII c. The rapid growth of analytical perfect forms was, perhaps, due to the influence of the Scandinavian dialects where perfect forms had already existed.

Passive Forms

In OE there was no opposition of the active and passive forms of the finite verb, except the opposition of the present and past participles. Nevertheless, there were free syntactic combinations consisting of bēon / wesan, weorþan and the past participle of transitive verbs, which served as the main source of analytical passive forms.

The verb phrase with «bēon» denoted a state resulting from a previous action, whereas the phrase with «weorþan» (become) denoted the transition into the state expressed by the past participle. The word «weorþan» occurred only in the past tense. The doer of the action was never mentioned.The past participle agreed with the subject in number and case. Cf.

Þæs ʒēares wǣrun ofslæʒene VIIII eorlas and ān cyninʒ (that year were killed 9 earls and one king) (nominative, plural)

Æþelwulf aldorman wearþ ofslæʒen (Athelwolf, alderman, was killed) (Anglo-Saxon Chronicles) (nominative, singular)

The past participle was often separated from the finite forms by other words. In the following examples «bēon» opens the sentence and the past participle closes it, with the subject and object between them (framing structure):

wæs sē īrenþrēat wǣpnum ʒewurþad (that iron army (clad in iron) was with weapon adorned (distinguished) (Beowulf).

þǣr wæs micel wæl ʒeslæʒen ( there was a big army slain) (Anglo-Saxon Chronicles)

In Early ME «werthen» (<OE weorþan) was still common, but not as common as the verb ben (< OE bēon). Soon «werthen» was replaced by numerous new link verbs: becomen (become), geten (get), semen (seem). There are no instances of «werthen» in Chaucer. So, «ben» (> NE be) became the only auxiliary of the passive. Now it could express not only a state but also an action even in the Future tense and in the Perfect forms, e.g. How shal the world be served? (Chaucer);

With many a tempest hadde his berde been shake. (His beard had been shaken with many tempests) (Chaucer).

The new passive forms acquired a regular means of indicating the doer of the action or the instrument with the help of which the action was performed. Out of a variety of prepositions employed for this purpose in OE – from, mid, wið, bi – only two were selected: by and with.

Though the original word order within the passive phrase remained intact for rather a long time a number of instances increased where the past participle stood close to the auxiliary and since the 15-th c. only the adverbs of indefinite time and manner occurred between the auxiliary and past participle.

With the establishment of the passive, the old forms acquired the meaning of non-passive or active forms, and the opposition passive – active constituted the category of voice.

In Late ME there arose new types of passive constructions built from intransitive verbs, i.e. whose subject corresponded to indirect and prepositional objects. It became possible after the loss of case inflections when both the indirect and prepositional objects in initial position came to be understood as the object of the sentence, e.g. He shulde soone delivered be gold in sakkis gret plenty (Chaucer) (He should be given (delivered) plenty of gold in sacks).

We’ll be waited on (Shakespeare).