On the Regenerative Tendencies of Grammatical Structures:The Romanian Present Presumptive

The paper aims to illustrate that the lack of a sharp distinction between grammatical categories causes certain verbal structures to oscillate between them. During a three-phase evolution cycle the meaning of these constructions suffers important changes due to the semantic shifts they undergo. In most cases, their original modal value transforms into a temporal one, which, at a second stage, evolves into a new modality. Diachronic evidence from Latin, French, Spanish, Italian and Romanian confirms the regenerative tendencies of these forms, among which the periphrasis voi fi `will be` + gerund has a slightly different evolution both in what form and meaning are concerned. Contemporary Romanian grammars include it in the Present Presumptive paradigm of the verb, but this is just the last phase of the longest series of semantic shifts documented for this type of grammatical structures.