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The English Auxiliary System: A Lexical-Functional Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Yehuda N. Falk
Yehuda N. Falk*
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Abstract

The nature of the auxiliary system in English has drawn much attention in the past fifteen years because it involve fundamental issues in linguistic theory, such as categories and the nature of levels of representation. This article presents an analysis of the English auxiliary system within the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (cf. Bresnan 1982c). By presenting explicit representations and explicit rules (syntactic and lexical), we find that an analysis incorporating a distinction between Modals and Verbs, in which auxiliaries like have and be belong to one of these categories depending on inflectional properties of particular forms, can explain all the relevant facts about auxiliaries that have appeared in the literature, Explicit analyses for ‘irregular’ auxiliaries like ought and used to are also provided.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 60 , Issue 3 , September 1984 , pp. 483 - 509
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 by Linguistic Society of America

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