Perfects, resultatives and auxiliaries in Early English Thomas McFadden and Artemis Alexiadou 1 Introduction Early English had constructions consisting of the past participle of the main verb plus an auxiliary have or be, as in 1, which look very much like the periphrastic perfects of many modern European languages: 1 (1) a. as when ha they þreo three weren were ifolen fallen onslepe. . . asleep. . . ‘When the three of them had fallen asleep. . . ’ (CMANCRIW-2,II.272.440) b. ... huanne . . . when hi he heþ has wel wel yuo te fought ‘. . . when he has fought well’ (CMAYENBI,252.2315) Such constructions are like their formal analogues in languages like German, Dutch and Italian in the following ways. They are active in voice, they involve at least implicit reference to past or anterior eventualities, and the auxiliary is usually BE with intran- sitive verbs denoting change of location or change of state, while it is usually HAVE with other intransitives as well as all transitives. 2 However, as is well known, English subsequently diverges from these other languages in losing the version with BE. In the 1 We use “Early English” as a cover term when speaking of Old English (OE), Middle English (ME) and Early Modern English (EModE) together. Except where otherwise noted, the data for this paper come from the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor, Warner, Pintzuk, and Beths 2003), the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, 2nd edition (Kroch and Taylor 1999) and the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (Kroch, Santorini, and Delfs 2005). The final line of each example gives the sentence ID as it appears in the original corpus file. 2 We write HAVE and BE in small capitals when referring to the auxiliaries in general, cross-linguistic terms. When what is intended are the specific lexical items of an individual language, we use italics, as in have and be for English, haben and sein for German. 1