ATOMIC PREDICATE INFLUENCE ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF FRENCH, SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE VERB SYSTEMS

Abstract

The article examines the influence of primitive semantic units—atomic predicates of existence, possessivity, and actionality—on the diachronic development and synchronic functioning of the verbal systems in French, Spanish, and Portuguese. The relevance of the study stems from the need for a comprehensive theoretical understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that govern both the grammaticalization of analytical tense forms and lexical-semantic derivation across the Romance area. The research material comprises data from modern socio-political periodicals of France, Spain, and Portugal, 20th-century fiction, and explanatory dictionaries, analyzed via cognitive-propositional modeling, componential analysis, and comparative-historical methods. The findings reveal that the impact of atomic predicates is ambivalent and operates along two opposite vectors. In the grammatical domain (analytical paradigms of past and future tenses), atomic predicates undergo semantic bleaching and argument reduction, facilitating their auxiliary function. Notably, differential evolutionary rates are identified: structural conservatism in French (avoir), functional specialization in Spanish (haber / tener), and the complete renewal of the auxiliary verb in Portuguese (ter). In the lexical domain, the atomic predicate of actionality (faire / hacer / fazer) acts as a conceptual attractor that incorporates nominal and locative arguments during denominal derivation and discursive metaphorization. The findings provide a unified theoretical model accounting for analytical renewal and semantic flexibility in Romance verbs.