Personal and impersonal verbs: from esse to “haver” denoting existence

Abstract

This is a diachronic morphosyntactic-lexical-semantic study, whose general theme concerns the existence of personal and impersonal verbs in Portuguese, based on bibliographic research that uses data sources made up of articles, dictionaries and books dedicated to the approach of themes related to Historical Linguistics, the History of the Portuguese Language and the Latin Language. The aim of this work is to investigate, having the theories presented as a starting point, whether the verb esse, whose possible meaning is the denotation of “to exist”, is personal or impersonal throughout time, and the possibilities of treating habere (to be/there to be) as personal in Classical Latin, contrasting the idea of seeing this verb as personal with haver meaning “to exist” being impersonal in Portuguese. Finally, the conclusion is that the process of the verb haver (denotating existence) becoming impersonal in the Portuguese language is due to the confusion between the Latin nominative and ablative cases during the process of linguistic change.