In Swedish it is possible to omit the nite temporal auxiliary have in subordinate clauses: jag känner en som (har) bott i Berlin, ’I know someone who has lived in Berlin’. Here, the present and past perfect are expressed with only the past participle. Ever since Johannisson (1945) it has been claimed that nite auxiliary omission emerged in Swedish at the end of the 17th century as a syntactic loan from New High German (NHG). This is proposition has later been restated by subsequent researchers (e.g. Platzack 1983, Malmgren 1985). Although the idea that Swedish auxiliary omission emerged due to German inuence has been reproduced in the literature, there has been no explanation of how this transfer might have proceeded in terms of a formal linguistic framework. In this paper I will suggest one. Heine & Kuteva (2005, 2006) have formulated a model for contact-induced syntactic change, namely grammatical replication. Grammatical replication encompasses syntactic structures associated with a certain meaning or function. In the process, a language (R) produces a new structure (Rx) based on the structure (Mx) in a model language (M). When nite auxiliary omission emerged in Swedish, there was a high frequency of equivalent verbless constructions in written NHG texts. German-Swedish language contact during the time is well documented, and I suggest that Swedish auxiliary omission is an instance of grammatical replication.