The treatment of verbal periphrases in the Spanish Grammars in the first half of the XX century

Abstract

In this paper we analyze the treatment verbal periphrases receive from a corpus consisting of sixteen Spanish grammars published in the first half of the twentieth century. We particularly study the terminology used by different authors, the type of analysis that these constructions receive, the criteria used to distinguish between periphrastic and non-periphrastic constructions and finally, the participial periphrases. We have found that they use different terms in addition to perífrasis, such as verbo-frase, voz perifrástica or formas compuestas con auxiliares. On the other hand, we have found that the grammarians use temporal, aspectual and modal criteria to characterize these constructions, although they do not refer to them explicitly using these categories. Finally, we have observed that they agree on considering the gerund and infinitive constructions as verbal periphrases, but not the participial ones.