The Even Yearbook 10 (2012)
#91
volume 10 (2012)
pages 80–125
author Mark Newson and Krisztina Szécsényi
title Dummy auxiliaries and late vocabulary insertion
keywords dummy auxiliaries, tense and aspect, event structure, lexicon, decomposition, OT, late vocabulary insertion, English, Hungarian
abstract Extending the analysis of Grimshaw (1997), according to which dummy do is merely the use of meaningful do with its semantic content ignored, in this paper we argue that, similarly to English do, non-main verb uses of be and have are also dummies. To account for the existence of different dummy forms we argue that not every aspect of a dummy’s content is ignored and it is on the basis of the remaining content that we can distinguish between them and their conditions of usage. All the three auxiliaries are shown to appear only when suffixes expressing tense and/or perfect cannot appear on their associated verbs. The differences in their content will ensure that they are the best dummies for the particular conditions of their insertion as determined by the different distributions of the event structure components of the constructions they appear in. These complex patterns of distribution can be captured with the help of a relatively small number of OT-type alignment constraints resulting in a uniform analysis of non-modal auxiliaries, and a more regular English verbal morphology.
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