Toward a Modular Theory of Auxiliary Selection

Abstract

There is no auxiliary selection rule. 'Have' is identical to 'be' but for the incorporation of an abstract preposition (cf. Freeze (1992)). The alternation is to be understood largely in terms of properties of the participial clause complement -whether it is full or reduced, whether AGR-S raises or not, whether Spec,AGR-0 is moved through or not, how many arguments the V has that need to be Case-licensed. Primarily Romance languages are considered, including a number not traditionally taken into consideration.

Middle-passive voice in Albanian and Greek

“…This is consistent with its selection properties as an aspectual auxiliary under the account sketched so far. It is worth noting that the picture suggested here is that 'have' and 'be' as auxiliaries are to be unified with 'have' and 'be' main verbs (see in particular Kayne 1993, Haider 2010). This in turn means that 'be', as the copula, will select more elementary structures than the transitive predicate 'have' -including open predicates (middle-passive voice, as here), but also in other languages, like Italian, elementary events (unaccusatives) as opposed to causative events (transitives and unergatives).…”

“…Correspondingly, the lexical verb selects the auxiliary, as in Burzio (1986). On the other hand, Kayne (1993) assumes that both the auxiliary and the participle have their own sentential projection and their own argument structure. There is considerable evidence that participles are not mere predicate projection, since they can have sentential interpretation, at least as adjuncts.…”

A note on cognate objects: Cognation as doubling

“…Let me elaborate on this point. According to Uriagereka (2001Uriagereka ( , 2005, syntactic doubling can provide the semantics of possession (in the sense of the Kayne 1993and Szabolcsi 1983/1984: this is transparent in the case of (13a), where there is a possessive relation between María and her cord, but it is also plausible for (13b), where Uriagereka (2001Uriagereka ( , 2005 takes the clitic to be associated to a null classifier with the rough semantics of 'persona'-this would be responsible for the referential reading that doubling clitics deploy: (13) The structure Uriagereka (2001Uriagereka ( , 2005 proposes for doubling is shown in (14). As can be seen, it contains three layers: (i) a small clause, which encodes conceptual (ultimately thematic) dependencies; (ii) an RP, whose specifier hosts the element that acts as a referential anchor; and (iii) a DP, which is responsible for determining contextual/grounding effects (in the sense of Higginbotham 1988 andRaposo &Uriagereka 1995).…”

Patterns of variation in existential constructions

“…X is in Y, cf. (48a)), possessive have has been derived from be through a step of grammaticalization and abstraction which in some analyses involves the incorporation of a preposition (Benveniste 1966, Freeze 1992, Kayne 1993, Heine 1997: in the possessive structure, then, Y (the location) possesses X (the theme) (48b). 20 The development of existentials requires the suppression of one of the two arguments (49), which is syntactically absorbed as an impersonal expletive or null subject, and semantically replaced by an abstract null argument providing the spatiotemporal coordinates for the predication (cf.…”

“…It would be natural, however, to assume that all existential constructions share the same semantics, and that the differences related to the selected copula are purely formal. Evidence of this kind is the source for the Benveniste/Kayne generalization (Benveniste 1966, Kayne 1993, formulated especially in reference to possessive and auxiliary structures, where a similar choice is also found. According to this generalization, have is analysed as the combination of the light or semantically empty copula be and a preposition (cf.…”