Old English had a possessive construction combining the verb habban ‘have’ and its direct object with a perfect participle in predicative function ().

The original meaning of this construction is ‘they had their king deposed’, i.e. their king was a deposed one. The reanalysis of this construction will be illustrated with a school example ().

On its way to Middle English, this construction is reanalyzed as a perfect construction. The ‘have’ verb is grammaticalized to a perfect auxiliary. This entails that it forms a periphrastic verb form together with its erstwhile predicate complement. This thereby becomes the main verb. The NP þā bōc keeps its direct object function, but it is no longer governed by the ‘have’ verb, but by the new periphrastic main verb form. This reanalysis is symbolized in the following diagram (the arrow is a dependency symbol):

As is principally the case in reanalysis, only the relations in the construction change, while nothing of this is visible in the expression. That the ‘have’ verb no longer designates possession becomes evident as soon as it is used with intransitive verbs, as there is then nothing to possess ().

Next, the relative order of the auxiliary and the non-finite verb form gets fixed. This is actually an aspect of a more general change affecting the position of the verb in subordinate clauses. Originally, such clauses had verb-final order. This concerns the finite verb, so that if the predicate of such a clause is periphrastic, the auxiliary follows the non-finite form, as it does in . Later, an analogical change adapts the subordinate-clause order to the main clause order, where the finite verb takes the second clause position, as it does in the translation of this example.

A further step in this development is the adaptation of the position of the dependents of the main verb. As long as they depend on habban, they are caught between the auxiliary and the non-finite verb, as is the object in and . Now that these components depend on the periphrastic verb form, they follow it just as they follow a synthetic verb form. This is an analogical change, represented in the following schema, where Y represents such a dependent.

This is an example of an analogical change whose target is a very general construction schema of the language which requires dependents of the verb except the subject to follow them. As a result of this adaptation, the periphrastic verb form is continuous just as a synthetic verb form; so it is more tightly integrated in the conjugation paradigm. This completes the grammaticalization of the English perfect. It is a process consisting of a set of phases which involve different mechanisms of grammatical change. The point to note here is that the reanalysis schematically represented above goes hand in hand with a grammaticalization.