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Lessons from the English auxiliary system
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 January 2019
Abstract
The English auxiliary system exhibits many lexical exceptions and subregularities, and considerable dialectal variation, all of which are frequently omitted from generative analyses and discussions. This paper presents a detailed, movement-free account of the English Auxiliary System within Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2010, Michaelis 2011, Boas & Sag 2012) that utilizes techniques of lexicalist and construction-based analysis. The resulting conception of linguistic knowledge involves constraints that license hierarchical structures directly (as in context-free grammar), rather than by appeal to mappings over such structures. This allows English auxiliaries to be modeled as a class of verbs whose behavior is governed by general and class-specific constraints. Central to this account is a novel use of the feature aux, which is set both constructionally and lexically, allowing for a complex interplay between various grammatical constraints that captures a wide range of exceptional patterns, most notably the vexing distribution of unstressed do, and the fact that Ellipsis can interact with other aspects of the analysis to produce the feeding and blocking relations that are needed to generate the complex facts of EAS. The present approach, superior both descriptively and theoretically to existing transformational approaches, also serves to undermine views of the biology of language and acquisition such as Berwick et al. (2011), which are centered on mappings that manipulate hierarchical phrase structures in a structure-dependent fashion.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019
Footnotes
The primary author of this paper, Ivan Sag, worked on aspects of the auxiliary system of English throughout his career in linguistics. He left a version of this comprehensive overview unfinished when he died in September 2013. His wish was that it should be finished and published as a co-authored journal article. The task of completion proved remarkably complex, and ultimately brought together a large cooperative team of his colleagues and friends – an outcome that would have greatly pleased him. A surprisingly large number of detailed problems had to be resolved by people well acquainted both with classical HPSG and the sign-based construction grammar (SBCG) that Ivan (with others) was developing over the last decade of his life. The order of names on the by-line of this paper reflects the various contributions to the work only imperfectly. The overall framework and content of the paper are entirely due to Sag; the vast majority of the rewriting was done by Chaves, who was in charge of the typescript throughout, and the other authors contributed by email in various ways to resolving the many problems that came up during the revision and refereeing. Ivan Sag acknowledged the financial support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; The System Development Foundation; Stanford’s Center for the Study of Language and Information; Das Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung, und Technologie (Project Verbmobil); grant no. IRI-9612682 from the National Science Foundation; and grant no. 2000-5633 from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He expressed thanks to three anonymous JL reviewers of the first version he submitted to this journal, and to discussants including Farrell Ackerman, Emily Bender, Rajesh Bhatt, Bob Borsley, Joan Bresnan, Alex Clark, Ann Copestake, Bruno Estigarribia, Hana Filip, Chuck Fillmore, Dan Flickinger, Gerald Gazdar, Jonathan Ginzburg, Jane Grimshaw, Paul Hirschbühler, Dick Hudson, Paul Kay, Jongbok Kim, Paul Kiparsky, Tibor Kiss, Shalom Lappin, Bob Levine, Sally McConnell-Ginet, David Pesetsky, Carl Pollard, Eric Potsdam, Geoff Pullum, Peter Sells, Anthony Warner, Tom Wasow, and Arnold Zwicky. The co-authors of the present version wish to note the valuable assistance they had from Bob Borsley, Danièle Godard, and especially Bob Levine, plus three further JL reviewers of the final version.
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