A note on the periphrastic past in Afrikaans

Abstract

The periphrastic past tense of Afrikaans, involving the auxiliary het, is compared with its ancestor construction in Dutch. I argue that the situation in Afrikaans provides support for the analysis of Germanic verb clusters in Zwart (2017), where periphrastic verb forms occupy cells in morphological paradigms, and enter the syntax only after the syntactic derivation has run its course.

Keywords

• minimalism
• periphrasis
• periphrastic past
• auxiliary