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Gradients in Auxiliary Selection with Intransitive Verbs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Antonella Sorace
Antonella Sorace*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
*
Dept. of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics University of Edinburgh Edinburgh EH8 9LL Scotland [antonella@ling.ed.ac.uk]
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Abstract

The primary purpose of this study is to present evidence, based on experimental data from Western European languages, that there is orderly variation in the choice of perfective auxiliary with intransitive verbs. Specifically, auxiliary selection is sensitive to a hierarchy of aspectual/thematic verb types: some verbs require a given auxiliary categorically, whereas others allow both auxiliaries to a greater or lesser extent depending on their position on the hierarchy. It is argued that this gradience has potentially important implications for the unaccusative hypothesis, and more generally for theories of the lexicon-syntax interface.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 76 , Issue 4-Part1 , December 2000 , pp. 859 - 890
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 Linguistic Society of America

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