Latin and Romance Influence on the Basque Verbal Morphosyntax

Abstract

Basque is the only non-Indo-European language in western Europe. This fact, and particularly its ergative alignment, make its morphosyntactic structure and its verb different from those of Standard Average European. However, the massive and prolonged influence which Basque has received first from Latin and later from Romance has conditioned the layout of the analytic vps (the open type) in a very curious way. Since Basque synthetic verbs have a template of the type S-vb.root for intransitives and O-vb.root-A for transitives, as opposed to vb.root-A/S for any kind of verb in sae, lexical borrowing of verbs from Latin was impossible. A solution arose when the old periphrastic resultative perfect was grammaticalized in Late Latin as the primary expression of the perfect. This form distinguished intransitive and transitive verbs, so it served as an entry point for Latin and Romance verbal lexicon into Basque, by means of autochthonous auxiliaries.