In this article, we investigate the peculiar distribution of the auxiliaries have and be in Earlier English and its consequences for theories of the perfect and auxiliary selection. We argue on the basis of a large-scale corpus study that the periphrastic construction with be was restricted to a stative resultative interpretation, whereas that with have developed a wider range of uses, crucially including the experiential perfect in addition to resultatives. Support comes from comparing the Earlier English patterns with related ones in Norwegian and German for which native-speaker judgments are available. On the basis of this insight, we propose distinct formal analyses for the two constructions and show how they account for the attested patterns and changes in Middle and Early Modern English. Of particular theoretical relevance is the premise that what has been called the “perfect” is not a homogeneous, monolithic category, and that certain kinds of variation can only be understood by teasing apart the pieces involved. Earlier English and German auxiliaries have distinct distributions because their “perfects” have disinct syntactic and semantic makeups.

The article establishes a novel generalization concerning the placement of arguments by Spell-Out. It centers on the principles that force arguments to leave the VP across languages. The empirical domain consists of constructions where subject movement is not required for reasons that have to do with the Extended Projection Principle. In these environments and whenever a sentence contains both a subject and a direct object, one of the arguments must vacate the VP. We argue that argument externalization is related to Case. It is forced because movement of both arguments to a single head T 0 that contains two active Case features in the covert component is banned.