Latin has a perfect tense ().

This survived in the Romance languages as a perfective past tense (exemplified by the last word in below). The perfect, however, was renewed in Vulgar Latin. The Latin word for ‘have’ is habere ().

Classical Latin may expand this construction by a passive participle in the function of a predicative complement to the direct object. illustrates this construction in a Vulgar Latin adaptation.

In Classical Latin, this construction implies that the actor has the undergoer at topic time. It may still have this sense in ancient Portuguese ().

In this phase of the grammaticalization process, the participle still agrees with the direct object in gender and number. Almost at the same time, however, the possessive sense vanishes in the evolving periphrastic construction. Here the verb haver functions as an auxiliary and the participle as the non-finite form of the full verb. Due to the syntactic relations in the source construction, this periphrastic perfect is initially limited to transitive verbs. In Old Portuguese, it becomes possible with intransitive verbs, too ().

Up to this point, the development resembles the story of the Old English perfect (ch. 3.2.3). So the Latin verb habere is now grammaticalized, not only as a perfect auxiliary, but also in other grammatical functions. In Old Portuguese, haver may still have its lexical sense ().

In Modern Portuguese haver is no longer used as a verb of possession. It is renewed, in this function, by desemanticizing Latin tenere ‘hold’. contrasts the original use of the latter with habeo ().

This verb is ter in Modern Portuguese and just means ‘have’; translates .

The verb ter has been used in this sense since the ancient Portuguese period ().

Although the periphrastic perfect illustrated by is not yet very old, the verb haver is replaced by ter not only in its possessive sense, but also in its function as perfect auxiliary. If one is to trust the documentary evidence, this happened just a little later than the onomasiological change in the lexeme ‘have’. Thus, the construction of replaces the construction of f.

The gender and number agreement of the participle with the direct object is a trait of persistence of the source construction, in which the two are in a predicative relation. This agreement is lost with further grammaticalization. In modern Portuguese, the sentence would read tenho perdido a metade da minha alma, with the default form of the non-finite verb form.

The Portuguese dialects differ slightly in the aspectual function of this construction: In European Portuguese, it is a perfect progressive; in Brazilian Portuguese, it is just a perfect, as it is already in .

This is a story of multiple replacements. The constant factor is the functional category of the perfect. The contemporary perfect has the same function as the perfect had one and a half millennia ago. It was renewed twice: first the synthetic Latin perfect was renewed as a periphrastic perfect, then this periphrastic perfect was renewed by replacing its auxiliary. The latter renewal is apparently a side effect of the onomasiological change in the lexeme ‘have’, which was itself renewed.