Morphology and Syntax in Competition: The Place of Inflectional Periphrasis

Inflectional periphrasis is the realization of inflectional properties by a lexical word‐form and an ancillary function word. In categorial periphrasis the inflectional property is entirely defined by the periphrase; in intersective periphrasis the periphrase occupies a cell in an otherwise synthetically realized paradigm. We set out the conceptual prerequisites: the notions of ‘inflectional property’, ‘(inflected) word‐form’, ‘lexeme’, and ‘paradigm’ and then discuss the criteria that have been proposed for determining whether a given construction is periphrastic, focusing on the feature intersection property and on non‐compositionality. We illustrate a variety of the phenomena and issues surrounding periphrasis with a detailed discussion of the very rich periphrastic verb morphology of Bulgarian, which illustrates, inter alia, the interaction with clitic systems and zero realization with periphrastic paradigms. We conclude with a survey of the kinds of grammaticalization paths that lead up to periphrasis and the subsequent developments shown by periphrases, focusing on clitic/affix alternations (morphologization) and morphosyntactic categorial mixing as evidence of partial grammaticalization, illustrated by comparison of the form of the have ‐perfect in the closely related languages Bulgarian and Macedonian.