Abstract

‘The sudden emergence of all the post-classical functions of habeo+Infinitive in Tertullian is very remarkable’, as Mr. Coleman has said in his important paper on the origin and development of this structure, so prominent in the formation of the Future and Conditional paradigms of the main Romance languages. The functions which he has in mind are all Prospective: he distinguishes meanings tangential, as he puts it, to Possibility, Obligation/Necessity, Futurity, and, for the past tenses of habeo, Futurity-in-the-Past and Conditioned Unreality. In this he essentially follows received opinion, though there have been those who would also distinguish a meaning tangential to Volition. Mr. Coleman gives these short shrift. Whether rightly, the reader may judge from what follows.