Auxiliary selection and counterfactuality in the history of English and Germanic

McFadden, Thomas; Αλεξιαδου, Αρτεμισ

doi:10.1075/la.97.12mcf

Cited by 15 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…This is so that an especially high or low frequency of verbs like work or say in a particular context will not skew the auxiliary frequencies.8 Not surprisingly, the differences between counterfactual and noncounterfactual periphrases here are highly statistically significant. For ME, 2 ‫ס‬ 256.0, p Յ .0001; for EModE, 2 ‫ס‬ 202.6, p Յ .0001.9 The similarly exceptionless appearance of have in periphrases below a modal auxiliary verb in ME reduces to the counterfactual effect, as we discuss inMcFadden and Alexiadou 2006. During this period, all such attested examples, like (i) and (ii), turn out to be past counterfactuals.…”

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confidence: 75%

Perfects, Resultatives, and Auxiliaries in Earlier English

McFadden

Αλεξιαδου

2010

Linguistic Inquiry

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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 largescale 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.

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confidence: 75%

Perfects, Resultatives, and Auxiliaries in Earlier English

McFadden

Αλεξιαδου

2010

Linguistic Inquiry

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“…We interpret the occurrence of HAVE in this context as indicating that the presence of ϕ-features on v Aux is determined by the mood features of T (or, as mentioned above, by the presence of an intervening Mood head). 11 It is worth noting in this context that HAVE appears to have been favoured in irrealis contexts in systems of argument-structure driven auxiliary selection; this is observed by Ledgeway (2003Ledgeway ( , 2009 for Old Neapolitan and by McFadden and Alexiadou (2006) for Middle English 11 EA has two other tenses that are worth mentioning here. The future perfect, which only has an epistemic modal meaning, is restricted to the 3 rd person: esse l'averrà fatte ('she must have done it'), jisse l'averrà fitte ('they must have done it').…”

Section: Auxiliary Selection and Split Ergativitymentioning

confidence: 87%

Past participle agreement in Abruzzese: split auxiliary selection and the null-subject parameter

D’Alessandro

Roberts²

2010

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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In this paper, we present an analysis of the "person-driven" auxiliaryselection system of one variety of the Upper Southern Italo-Romance dialect Abruzzese, along with an account of the pattern of past participle agreement in this variety, which differs somewhat from what is found in more familiar Romance languages. Our account relies on the technical mechanisms of agreement as outlined in Chomsky (1995Chomsky ( , 2001, in particular a variant of Chomsky's (2008) proposal regarding feature inheritance by non-phase heads of features belonging to phase heads, combined with Gallego's (2006) notion of phase-sliding. We also utilise some aspects of Müller's (2004) analysis of ergativity, and propose an account of a typological generalisation regarding the absence of person-driven auxiliary selection first put forward in Kayne (2000:127) in the Germanic languages. To the extent that the analyses proposed successfully apply the mechanisms put forward in the recent versions of the minimalist program, the postulation of these mechanisms is supported by our analysis with evidence from a new empirical domain. We also offer some general speculations regarding auxiliary selection in general.

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“…In their series of investigations on the history of the alternation of HAVE and BE in the Germanic languages, McFadden & Alexiadou (2006a;2006b;2006c;2010) argue that the difference between the two auxiliaries with regard to their occurrence in counterfactual contexts (the 'irrealis effect') is an indicator that BE has not yet been grammaticalised to an anterior auxiliary. Crucially, they push this idea one step further: if be and have in Middle and Early Modern English are not free variants, it appears implausible to analyse the historical process by which be disappeared as involving the replacement of be by have.…”

Section: Replacement or Stability?mentioning

confidence: 98%

How to measure replacement: Auxiliary selection in Old Spanish bibles

Rosemeyer

2012

Folia Linguistica Historica

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Studies of the development of compound tense auxiliary selection in Spanish frequently analyse ser ('to be') + past participle (PtP) as an anterior construction, and its disappearance as a slow replacement process starting in Old Spanish, in which the new anterior auxiliary aver ('to have') replaced it. This article investigates and rejects the empirical basis for this claim on the basis of a comparative analysis of Old Spanish bible translations. It is argued that the majority of tokens of ser + PtP has a resultative function, as indicated by typical patterns of verbal mood, coordination and temporal-aspectual morphology. Old Spanish translators of the bible appear to have regarded aver + PtP as being more similar to simple imperfective preterit forms like cantaba ('s/he sang') than to ser + PtP. Comparing the types and rates of use of aver + PtP and ser + PtP in earlier and later bible versions with the help of generalised linear mixed-effects regression models shows that ser + PtP was more stable in Old Spanish than hitherto assumed. Rather than replacing ser + PtP in Old Spanish, aver + PtP expanded at the expense of simple preterit forms. In summary, this article provides empirical evidence against the replacement hypothesis for Old Spanish, while at the same time assessing ways to quantitatively identify replacement processes in diachronic linguistics.

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Auxiliary selection and counterfactuality in the history of English and Germanic

Cited by 15 publications

References 17 publications

Perfects, Resultatives, and Auxiliaries in Earlier English

Perfects, Resultatives, and Auxiliaries in Earlier English

Past participle agreement in Abruzzese: split auxiliary selection and the null-subject parameter

How to measure replacement: Auxiliary selection in Old Spanish bibles

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