The paper deals with a much disputed topic of defining the grammatical status of habban+participle II in Old English and the rise of the perfect. The main focus is paid on the application of semantic and syntactic criteria aimed at teasing apart the state-resultant properties of the construction from the perfect ones. Such diagnostics as the types of subjects and objects used with habban within the construction under question are employed. This allowed for a better definition of the status of the possessive verb which is argued to function as a copula showing relations between the subject and either object or a completed action. Not all examples can succumb to a state-resultant interpretation. It was shown that such instances, though they are few, are encountered mostly in later Old English when the semantics of the construction was undergoing changes. Moreover, the application of such a syntactic criterion as the use of objects, viz. cases where no objects are found, reinforces our conclusion drawn from the use of subjects. It is argued that an overlap of several diagnostics in one context in the use of the construction can be a reliable means for identification of the perfect. Sporadic usage of the perfect in Old English is interpreted in terms of the grammaticalization theory and considered to be implicatures that are not fixed in the grammatical system of the language and that later will become conventionalized to give rise to a new category of the perfect.