On Auxiliary ChainsLexical and Functional Auxiliaries at the syntax-semantics interface

  1. Bravo, Ana 1
  2. García, Luis 2
  3. Krivochen, Diego Gabriel 3
  1. 1 Universidad de Murcia
    info

    Universidad de Murcia

    Murcia, España

    ROR https://ror.org/03p3aeb86

  2. 2 Departamento de Lengua Española I y Teoría de la Literatura, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
  3. 3 University of Reading
    info

    University of Reading

    Reading, Reino Unido

    ROR https://ror.org/05v62cm79

Revista:
Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics

ISSN: 1893-3211

Ano de publicación: 2015

Volume: 4

Número: 2

Páxinas: 71-101

Tipo: Artigo

DOI: 10.7557/1.4.2.3612 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openAcceso aberto editor

Outras publicacións en: Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics

Resumo

The present paper is focused on the study of those relations that auxiliary verbs can establish among themselves when chained in a sequence. Regarding those sequences, which in Spanish can be considerably long, the literature has displayed primarily interest in formulating a set of principles that can predict possible relative orderings among auxiliaries. On the contrary, our paper delves into a less walked path: the description of relations established within an auxiliary chain. We will start from the traditional definition of auxiliary verb as a unit that modifies the ‘main’ or ‘lexical’ verb, and proceed to show that such a conception makes the wrong predictions when it comes to explain those internal relations, for it only accounts for a subset of the cases. This explanatory problem is common to both traditional and more formal models. In our opinion, the distinction between between lexical and functional auxiliaries that we propose in this work, in the context of a dynamic computational model that includes and derives this distinction, allows us to overcome these shortcomings of traditional analyses.