The Syntax of Auxiliaries From a Cross-linguistic
Perspective∗
Bronwyn M. Bjorkman
CLA, May 28–30 2011

1

Introduction

The Question: Why do auxiliary verbs like be occur in natural language?
A Traditional Answer: Auxiliaries are default verbs; they occur to realize inflection that is notable to be realized on a main verb.
• This talk argues for a particular implementation of this traditional answer, based on largely
undiscussed variation in the distribution of auxiliary constructions.
• More specifically, I argue that auxiliary be is a morphological default inserted to realize
inflectional material that is syntactically “stranded” from the main verb.
• This is similar to recent analyses proposed for English be (Schütze, 2003; Cowper, 2010), butdiffers in order to provide a unified analysis of the cross-linguistic profile of auxiliary be.
Plan for the talk:§2 Illustrate two patterns of auxiliary use, motivating default be.
§3 Develop a simple model of verbal inflection, framed in terms of Agree.
§4-5 Apply this model to the observed typology of auxiliary constructions.
§5 Implications of the analysis with respect to reduced relative clauses.
§6 Conclusions.
I’d like to thank Claire Halpert, Sabine Iatridou, Patrick Jones, Hrayr Khanjian, David Pesetsky, Norvin
Richards, and the audience of MIT’s Ling-Lunch for much helpful discussion and many clarifying questions andsuggestions. Thanks also to Jennifer Faulkner and Elena Innes for help with the Latin examples.
∗

1

2

Two patterns of auxiliary use: additive and overflow

A typology of auxiliary patterns:• Additive pattern: certain inflectional categories always occur with an auxiliary.
• Overflow pattern: auxiliaries appear only in combinations of categories.

2.1

Additive auxiliary patterns

Familiar from languages like English and French: certain inflectional categories “come with” anauxiliary. If multiple auxiliary-taking categories co-occur, multiple auxiliaries appear.
English: both the passive and the progressive trigger insertion of auxiliary be (1a-b). When thetwo co-occur, you get two auxiliaries (1c):
(1)

a.
b.
c.

The children were eating the cake.
The cake was eaten.
The cake was being eaten.

Progressive
Passive
Progressive Passive

Basque: (obligatory) aspectual inflection on the main verb requires tense to be marked on an
associated auxiliary (Laka, 1993; Arregi, 2000). The present perfective and past imperfective
are illustrated in (2) (examples from Arregi 2000):
(2)

a.

b.

Jon-ek liburu irakurr-i dau.
Jon-erg book read-pfv aux.pres1“Jon has read the book.”
Jon asarra-tzen
sa-n.
Jon get.angry-impf aux-past“Jon used to get angry.”Present Perfective

Past Imperfective

Finnish: the perfect in Finnish is formed with a present or past tense form of the verb olla ‘tobe’ followed by a participle. Present and past perfects are illustrated in (3a-b):
(3)

a.

b.

Lapsetovat
syö-neet kakku.
The.children be.pres eat-ptcp the.cake“The children have eaten the cake.”
Lapsetolivat syö-neet kakku.
The.children be.past eat-ptcp the.cake“The children had eaten the cake.”

1

Present Perfect

Past Perfect

Basque auxiliaries alternate between be and have forms (auxiliary selection), with the choice determined by thetransitivity/agreement properties of the clause (Arregi, 2004). Time does not permit this alternation to be discussed
here, and auxiliary forms are therefore glossed simply as aux.
It should also be noted that a small set of verbs in Basque do allow synthetic past and present forms (Arregi, 2000;
de Rijk, 2007); these simple tense verbs do not appear to mark aspectual contrasts (Arregi, 2000). This fact will betaken up in section 5.2.

2

A simple selectional account:• The additive pattern has lent itself to the hypothesis that be is syntactically represented,
either as the head of associated inflectional projections, as in (4a), or as the head of independent projections that subcategorize for inflectional projections, as in (4b):
(4)

a.

b.
...

...
XP

...
X0

AuxP/BeP

...
...

be

Aux0 / Be0
be

XP
X0

...

• A range of questions have arisen from such representations:◦ Is Aux0 is a separate syntactic category from V0 ?
◦ Is it the auxiliary or the main verb that carries inflectional semantics?
◦ Why do auxiliaries not have to occur in environments such as reduced relative clauses?
(See §6)• As we will see immediately below, however, these kinds of representations are largely incompatible with auxiliary patterns in other languages: the overflow pattern.

2.2

Overflow auxiliary patterns

In the overflow pattern, individual categories do not require the use of an auxiliary, but certain
combinations of categories do.
Framed syntactically, this distribution would look something like (5):(5)

* [ AuxP [ XP ] ]* [ AuxP [ YP ] ]X [ AuxP [ XP [ YP ] ] ]What I will claim instead is that the structural combination of XP and YP prevents X0 fromestablishing a relationship with V0 , triggering the occurrence of be.

3

Kinande shows an overflow interaction between aspect and tense.
Simple verb forms exist for past and for various aspects (imperfective, progressive, incompletive, and inceptive), as we see in (6a-b).
An auxiliary appears, however, in a past tense aspectual form.
(6)

a.

b.

c.

tw-á-húma
1pl-past-hit‘We hit (recently, not today)’tu-nému-húma
1pl-prog-hit‘We are hitting’tw-á-bya
i-tu-nému-húma
1pl-past-be lnk-1pl-prog-hit‘We were (recently, not today) hitting.’

Recent Past

Progressive

Recent Past + Progressive

Palestinian Arabic also shows an overflow interaction between aspect and tense. Simple forms
exist for the (present) imperfective and past (perfective) (7a-b), but an auxiliary appears in
the past imperfective (7c).
(Examples from Karawani and Zeijlstra 2010).
(7)

a.

b.

c.

katb-atwrite.pst.pfv-3sg.f“She wrote.”b-tuktobb-write.impf“She usually writes.” (“. . . will write”)
kaanat tuktub
be.pst write.impf‘She used to write.”

Past

Imperfective

Past + Imperfective

Latin shows an overflow interaction between aspect and voice. Simple tensed forms exist for boththe perfect and the passive in isolation (8a-b), but the perfect passive requires an auxiliary(8c):2
(8)

a.

b.

c.

Puellaecrustulum
consumpserunt.
girl-pl.nom small.pastry-acc eat-pl.pfv“The girls ate the little pastry.”
Crustulum
consumitur.
small.pastry-nom eat-pres.pass“The little pastry is (being) eaten.”
Crustulum
consumptum est.
small.pastry-nom eat-pass.ptcp be.3sg.pres“The little pastry was / has been eaten.”

Perfect

Passive

Perfect + Passive

2
This is true not only of regular passives, but also of deponents – verbs that are syntactically transitive but
morphologically resemble passives (Embick, 2000).

4In the overflow pattern, no single syntactic category is correlated with the presence of be.
This argues against a syntactic representation of auxiliaries.
There is no head X0 to which be can be merged, or which be can select.
Auxiliaries as defaults: The overflow pattern instead suggests that auxiliaries realize inflectional
information that was for some reason unable to be realized on the main verb.
This could be an arbitrary morphological fact: no “slot” on the verb for some affixes.
I will argue instead for a structural account: complex inflectional syntax causes certain
inflectional features to be “stranded”, i.e. syntactically unable to combine with the verb.
This structural account will unify the analysis of the additive and overflow patterns.

3

An Agree-based model of verbal inflection

This section shows that a very simple syntax for verbal inflection can generate the overflow patternof auxiliary use, together with the following principle governing the occurrence of auxiliary be:3
Auxiliary be is inserted to realize verbal inflection that would otherwise be“stranded”, i.e. that is unable to combine with a main V0 .
Agree and verbal inflection• For a uniform model of auxiliary insertion to be viable we need a cross-linguistically uniform
mechanism for manipulating verbal inflection.
• Work on verbal inflection, however, presents a non-uniform array of syntactic mechanisms:◦ Lowering (Chomsky, 1957; Bobaljik, 1995; Embick and Noyer, 2001, a.o.)◦ Raising (Emonds, 1978; Pollock, 1989; Chomsky, 1993, a.o.)◦ Agree (Chomsky, 1998; Adger, 2003; Pesetsky and Torrego, 2007, a.o)
• Neither Raising nor Lowering can offer a unified approach to auxiliaries and verbal inflection.
◦ Languages that differ precisely in whether they have verbs in situ or in T0 have very
similar auxiliary profiles: consider English and French (Emonds, 1978; Pollock, 1989)
(9)

a.

b.

English: auxiliaries in passive and perfect (and progressive)(i) The cake was eaten.
(ii) The children have eaten the cake.
French: auxiliaries in passive and perfect(i) Le gâteau était mangé.
(ii) Les enfants ont mangé le gâteau.

3

Though we are discussing here only auxiliary be, I assume that the same approach will apply to copular an
predicative be as well. Similar principles are advanced in Schütze (2003) and Cowper (2010) for English, andimplicitly assumed by both Embick (2000) (for Latin) and Arregi (2000) (for Basque).

5• This leaves Agree as a potentially unified mechanism for the manipulation of verbal inflection.
• Two things in need of clarification for an Agree-based approach to inflection:
1. Directionality of Agree
2. Locality of Agree with respect to verbal inflection
Directionality of Agree: Where are inflectional feature values introduced?
• The theoretical role of projections such as Asp0 and T0 is to introduce inflectional information, and provide the locus of its semantic interpretation.
◦ This is reflected in Raising and Lowering approaches, where affixes (or their features)are introduced in these positions.
◦ Not reflected in standard Agree:− Chomsky (1998): only unvalued and uninterpretable features act as Probes.
− Pesetsky and Torrego (2002, 2007): only unvalued or uninterpretable features act
as Probes.
− valued inflectional features must therefore be introduced on V0 (and on higher
intermediate inflectional heads).4◦ Evidence that inflectional values are not introduced on V0 : morphological mismatches
in VP ellipsis.
(10)

John slept and Mary will <sleep> too.

− Lasnik (1995, 1997) argues convincingly that the possibility of morphological mismatches under ellipsis requires that main verbs be merged without inflectional information/features, because if verbs were merged with inflectional information, there
would be no level of representation at which antecedent and ellipsis site satisfy identity.
• I therefore adopt a non-standard view of Agree, in which feature valuation can occur downward
in a tree. This follows work by many others, including: Baker (2008), Haegeman and Lohndal(2010), Zeijlstra (2010), Merchant (2011), and Wurmbrand (2011), among others.
Locality: What accounts for the locality of inflectional feature transmission?
• Agree is potentially long-distance, while inflectional features appear to enter into highly
local relationships.
◦ Relativized Minimality (Rizzi, 1990, et seq.) requires only that a feature Agree with theclosest potential target.
◦ If all inflectional heads bore features of different types, there could be tense Agreement
between T0 and V0 even in the presence of inflectional features on an intervening Asp0 .
4

Another alternative would be to introduce valued inflectional features on higher functional heads, but to allow
Agree to be “parasitic” on some other unvalued or uninterpretable Probe (i.e. a subcategorization feature). If
intermediate heads are both sources and targets of inflectional Agreement, however, allowing parasitic Agree would
allow inflectional features to travel “up” the tree, contrary to observed patterns.

6◦ What we seem to find, however, is that every (specified) inflectional head in auxiliating
languages blocks feature transmission to all the positions below it.
• To achieve this result, I assume that all inflectional features are different values of a single
feature type: I adopt the notation [infl: ] from Adger (2003).
Putting this all together:• Valued inflectional features on functional heads Agree with unvalued counterparts on lower
heads. Intermediate heads bear both valued and unvalued inflectional features.
(11)

Agree
Agree is a relationship between two features such that an unvalued feature [F: ] receives
the value of a feature [F:val] of the same type iff:a. A head α containing [F: ] is c-commanded by a head β containing [F:val].
b. There is no head γ containing a matching feature [F:(val)], such that γ c-commands α
and β c-commands γ.

• This is illustrated in (12), where dashed lines indicate Agree relations. Agree is a relationshipbetween features, though as we are concerned only with a single feature type, for convenience
I will often speak of Agree between two heads.
(12)

XP
X0

YP

[iinfl : x]

Y0

VP

[uinfl : ][iinfl : y]V0[uinfl : ]X• Mitigating the strict locality of Agree is the non-specification of certain feature values: suchfeatures are non-visible for the purposes of Agree.5• A head without specified inflectional features will never act as an intervenor for Agree, simply
because it contains no information that could potentially be a target of Agreement:6
5

This builds on the concept of featural markedness, originally developed in the context of phonology, but longextended to morphology and syntax (Jakobson, 1939, Greenberg, 1966, Olsen, 1997, Comrie, 1976, Dahl, 1985).
6
Strictly speaking, we must further stipulate that an inflectional head without a positive feature [iinfl:val] cannot
contain an [uinfl : ].

7

(13)

XP
X0
[iinfl : x]

YP
Y0

VP

—

V0
[uinfl : ]• Languages will differ in which features they choose not to specify, reflecting independently
known variation in feature markedness. In particular, the languages under discussion will varyin whether they are perfective-default or imperfective-default.
We are now in a position to more precisely formulate the condition on auxiliary occurrence:
Auxiliary be is inserted post-syntactically to support verbal inflectional featuresthat are realized as affixes but which are morphologically interpreted in a headthat does not contain V0 .
§4 turns to applying this system to the overflow pattern.

4

Accounting for the Overflow Pattern

4.1

KinandeRecall from (6), repeated in (14), that Kinande uses auxiliaries in tense-aspect combinations, thoughneither tense nor aspect requires an auxiliary in isolation:
(14)

a.

b.

c.

tw-á-húma
1pl-past-hit‘We hit (recently, not today)’tu-nému-húma
1pl-prog-hit‘We are hitting’tw-á-bya
i-tu-nému-húma
1pl-past-be lnk-1pl-prog-hit‘We were (recently, not today) hitting.’

Recent Past

Progressive

Recent Past + Progressive• (14a) and (14b) each involve only a single active inflectional head, if we assume that present
T0 and perfective Asp0 are unspecified (and ∴ non-visible) in Kinande,7 .
7Following Nurse (2008) for the Bantu language family generally.

8• This head will Agree with V0 in both cases, leaving no stranded features.8(Unvalued features have been omitted from these and subsequent trees.)(15)

a. tu-nému-húma (Progressive)
1pl-prog-hit
TPT0

tw-á-húma (Recent Past)
1pl-past-hit
TP
T0

AspP
Asp0

VP

[iinfl:prog]

V0

—

b.

[iinfl:rec-past]

AspP
Asp0

VP

—

V0

• In a past progressive, by contrast, both T0 and Asp0 will have visible features.
• V0 will Agree with Asp0 ; T0 subsequently Agrees with Asp0 , but is blocked from Agreeing
with V0 .
• The features of T0 will be stranded, triggering morphological realization as twábya.
(16)

tw-á-bya
i-tu-nému-húma (Past Progressive)
1pl-past-be lnk-1pl-prog-hit
TPT0[iinfl:rec-past]

AspP
Asp0

VP

[iinfl:prog]

V0

8

The VP-internal verb of these trees is a simplification. Following previous work, I assume that the Kinande verb
does move through VP-external argument-structural projections, corresponding to the ‘extension’ suffixes.

9

4.2

Palestinian Arabic(17), repeated from (7), shows that while Palestinian Arabic has simple imperfective and past forms,
it requires an auxiliary to express the past imperfective:
(17)

a.

b.

c.

katb-atwrite.pst.pfv-3sg.f“She wrote.”b-tuktobb-write.impf“She usually writes.” (“. . . will write”)
kaanat tuktub
be.pst write.impf‘She used to write.”

Past

Imperfective

Past + Imperfective• This is exactly parallel to Kinande, and a parallel analysis is available: both present T0 andperfective Asp0 are unspecified, and therefore non-visible.9• When only one head has visible features, it will be able to Agree directly with the verb (as in(17a-b)).
• Both heads will be syntactically visible, however, in the past imperfective, and so the [past]features of T0 will be stranded.
(18)

kaanat tuktub(Past + Imperfective)
be.pst write.impf
TPT0[iinfl:past]

AspP
Asp0

VP

[iinfl:impf]

V0• Palestinian Arabic differs from Kinande, however, in having head movement in the inflectional domain: VSO word orders are often attributed in Arabic to verb movement to T0 in
the presence of a VP/v P subject (Carnie and Guilfoyle, 2000, citing Mohammed 1988 andFassi Fehri 1993).
• In the past perfective, where Asp0 is non-visible, we can propose that this arises because
Agree between features of T0 and V0 is accompanied by head movement, represented bysolid angled lines:10
910

On the non-specification of present tense features in the present imperfective, see Benmamoun (1999, 2000).
I assume that head movement occurs only on the basis of a pre-existing Agree relation, as proposed for phrasal

10

(19)

katbat(Past)
write.pst.pfv-3sg.f
TP
T0

AspP

[iinfl:past]

Asp0

VP

—

V0

• In the (default present) imperfective, however, T0 has no visible features and therefore cannot
attract V0 via Agree.
• Were Asp0 to attract V0 , T0 ’s [past] feature in (18) would not be stranded, and we would
predict that no auxiliary would occur.
• The inflectional system therefore predicts that V0 is lower in the simple imperfective than it
is in the past.
• Independent Support: Benmamoun (1999, 2000) argues that the simple imperfective verb
is lower than a past-inflected verb in at least some varieties of Arabic, citing its position
relative to negation and low subjects.11(20)

Imperfective: b-tuktob
TP
T0

AspP
Asp0

VP

[iinfl:impf]

V0—Interim Summary• In Palestinian Arabic, we have seen that the distribution of head movement in the inflectional
domain has the potential to interact with the distribution of auxiliary constructions.
• We will see in the next section that when V0 does move to intermediate projections, it canpotentially Agree with more than one head: this will be the case in Latin.
movement by Chomsky (1998). This requires that head movement occur in the narrow syntax, as argued in an
increasing body of work (Lechner, 2006; Matushansky, 2006; Hartman, 2010; Iatridou and Zeijlstra, 2010). As aresult, head movement will never target a head without visible features.
11
As in Kinande, it is possible that the verb raises out of VP/v P to some intermediate position still below AspP.
This would account for the fact that VSO order is still possible with imperfective main verbs.

11

4.3

Latin

Recall from (8), repeated in (21), that in the cases under discussion, Latin uses an auxiliary onlyin the combination of the perfect and the passive, as in (21c).
(21)

a.

b.

c.

Puellaecrustulum
consumpserunt.
girl-pl.nom small.pastry-acc eat-pl.pfv“The girls ate the little pastry.”
Crustulum
consumitur.
small.pastry-nom eat-pres.pass“The little pastry is (being) eaten.”
Crustulum
consumptum est.
small.pastry-nom eat-pass.ptcp be.3sg.pres“The little pastry was / has been eaten.”

Perfect

Passive

Perfect + Passive• In Latin we have three inflectional categories interacting: tense, aspect, and voice.
• In all cases in (21), the main verb shows inflection for two inflectional categories.
• This can be accounted for by head movement of V0 to intermediate projections: this allows
it to become local for Agree with higher projections: i.e. T0 :12(22)

XP
X0 [iinfl:x]

YP

Y0 [iinfl:y] – V0

VP
tV 0

• In the perfect and the passive, V0 Agrees with either Asp0 or Voice0 ; we assume that active
Voice0 and imperfective Asp0 are not specified (hence non-visible).
• Head movement accompanies Agree between V0 and Voice0 , and between V0 and Asp0 ,and as a result V0 is accessible to Agreement from T0 .
12

Languages will differ, perhaps arbitrarily, on whether particular Agree relationships are accompanied by head
movement. This instantiates widely assumed variation between languages (whether they have V0 -to- T0 or V0 -toC0 movement, for example) on a smaller scale.

12

(23)

a. consumpserunt (Perfect)
eat-pl.pfv

b.

consumitur (Passive)
eat-pres.pass
TP

TP
T0

T0

AspP

[iinfl:pres]

Asp0

VoiceP[iinfl:pfv][iinfl:pres]

Voice0

VP

—

V0

AspP
Asp0
—

VoiceP
Voice0VP[iinfl:pass]V0• When both Voice0 and Asp0 contain visible features, the overflow interaction arises: assuming that there is no head movement between these positions, V0 will remain in Voice0 , inwhich position it will be inaccessible to Agreement with T0 , stranding T0 ’s features.13(24)

consumptum est(Perfect Passive)
eat-pass.ptcp be.3sg.pres
TP
T0

AspP

[iinfl:pres]

Asp0

VoiceP
Voice0VP[iinfl:pass]V0[iinfl:pfv]

Interim Summary• In Latin the presence of head movement of V0 to higher inflectional heads allows the verb
to express more than one inflectional category.
• As in Palestinian Arabic, however, the absence of head movement in a particular corner ofthe inflectional system gives rise to an overflow auxiliary pattern.
13

Embick (2000) presents an analysis of the Latin facts similar in spirit to this one. On that account Latin T0
is stranded in the perfect passive because T0 was unable to attract Asp0 precisely when Asp0 contains passive
features. The advantage of the account proposed here is that head movement is uniformly absent between two
particular positions, and the presence or absence of head movement is linked to the instantiated Agree relation(rather than to other features coincidentally present).

13

4.4

Summary of the system

In this section we have seen that a very simple model of verbal inflection can account for theoverflow pattern of auxiliary use, when taken together with the idea that auxiliary be realizes
stranded inflectional features.
1. Inflectional features are manipulated by Agree, and all (visible) inflectional heads are intervenors for this Agree.
2. Some inflectional feature values are unspecified, and therefore non-visible to Agree.
3. Head movement may accompany Agree, bringing a head (i.e. V0 ) into local relationships
with more than one inflectional head
Languages differ both in the feature values they choose to specify, and in their distribution of head
movement, accounting for variation in auxiliary patterns.
In the next section we will see that this same system also accounts for the additive pattern ofauxiliary use, without any further machinery.

5

Accounting for the Additive Pattern

5.1

EnglishWith English we arrive at the additive pattern. As we will see, the mechanisms underlying theexpression of auxiliaries will remain unchanged, but circumstances will be such that any combinationof two visible inflectional heads will result in stranded features.
Unspecified (and ∴ non-visible) values: Non-progressive Asp0 and active Voice0
Head movement: T0 attracts Voice0 and Asp0 . V0 remains in situ 14• In the progressive V0 Agrees with Asp0 , and in the passive with Voice0 , but neither Agreerelation is accompanied by head movement.
• In both cases, T0 Agrees with a visible inflectional head, but is unable to Agree with V0 .
• A [infl:past] feature is stranded in both cases, triggering insertion of auxiliary were/was.
(25)

a. were eating (Progressive)b. was eaten (Passive)

TP
T0

TP
T0

AspP

[iinfl:past]

Asp0[iinfl:prog]

VoiceP
Voice0

VP

—

V0
14

[iinfl:past]

AspP
Asp0

VoiceP
Voice0VP[iinfl:pass]V0—• In the progressive passive, the fact that T0 , Asp0 , and Voice0 all contain visible features
leads to features being stranded in two positions.
• Voice0 Agrees with V0 , but V0 remains in situ.
• Asp0 Agrees with Voice0 , but not with V0 . Its [prog] feature is therefore stranded on
Voice0 , triggering realization as auxiliary being.
• T0 Agrees with and attracts Asp0 , but also cannot Agree with V0 . Its [past] features are
likewise stranded, triggering auxiliary was.
(26)

was being eaten (Progressive Passive)TPT0[iinfl:past]

AspP
Asp0

VoiceP
Voice0VP[iinfl:pass]V0[iinfl:prog]

5.2

BasqueRecall from (2), repeated in (27), that Basque obligatorily uses auxiliaries for any combination oftense and aspect:
(27)

a.

b.

Jon-ek liburu irakurr-i dau.
Jon-erg book read-pfv aux.pres“Jon has read the book.”
Jon asarra-tzen
sa-n.
Jon get.angry-impf aux-past“Jon used to get angry.”• The analysis of this pattern will posit that Basque, like Kinande, involves no head movement
and only two interacting heads.
• The differences between the languages arise from the fact that Basque specifies all feature
values for both T0 and Asp0 (i.e., there are no non-visible features):
Unspecified (∴ non-visible) values: none.
Head movement: none.
• Asp0 Agrees with V0 , but V0 remains in situ.
• T0 Agrees with Asp0 , but is unable to Agree with V0 .
• Stranded tense features in T0 require realization on an auxiliary.
15

(28)

irakurri dau.
(Present Perfective)
read-pfv aux.pres
TPT0[iinfl:pres]

AspP
Asp0

VP

[iinfl:pfv]

V0• In addition to the auxiliary pattern discussed here, Arregi (2000) discusses a small set of verbs
that do have simple present and past tense forms (alongside periphrastic aspectual forms).
• Observing that these have default aspectual values, Arregi proposes that they optionally lackan Asp0 projection, allowing V0 to directly compose with T0• In the framework adopted here, this can be straightforwardly replaced by the assumption thatthese verbs are exceptionally able to select an Asp0 with unspecified feature values. In suchconfigurations T0 is able to Agree directly with V0 .

5.3

FinnishAs (29), repeated from (3), shows, Finnish uses the auxiliary olla ‘to be’ to form the perfect, justas many familiar Indo-European languages do.
(29)

a.

b.

Lapsetovat
syö-neet kakku.
The.children be.pres eat-ptcp the.cake“The children have eaten the cake.”
Lapsetolivat syö-neet kakku.
The.children be.past eat-ptcp the.cake“The children had eaten the cake.”• This pattern can be accounted for if Finnish, like English but unlike Basque, has visible feature
specifications for all values of T0 , but only for perfect values of Asp0 .
Unspecified (∴ non-visible) values: imperfective Asp0
Head movement: none.

16

(30)

ovat
syö-neet (Present Perfect)
be.pres eat-ptcp
TPT0[iinfl:pres]

6

AspP
Asp0

VP

[iinfl:perf]

V0

Implications: reduced relative clauses

So far we have seen that the proposed system of verbal inflection provides a unified account of where
auxiliaries occur in both overflow and additive contexts.
In this section we will see that it also straightforwardly predicts a well-known generalization concerning the possible absence of auxiliaries.
Reduced relatives and (the absence of) be:• The rule traditionally called Whiz -deletion in English creates reduced relative clauses. As its
name suggests, Whiz -deletion is possible only with the verb be, not with other auxiliaries (i.e.
have):(31)

a. The cake eaten by the children
b. The children eating the cakec. *The children eaten the cake• This generalization has been extended beyond English: we find that reduced relatives can beformed from counterparts of (31c) in languages where the perfect auxiliary is (or can be) aform of be, but not where it is have (Bulganian, Italian, Slovenian, Spanish15 : Iatridou et al.,
2003; Krause, 2001; Marvin, 2002)• On a syntactic account of be’s distribution, the lack of an auxiliary in (31a-b) is arbitrary:
additional machinery is needed to explain why be does not occur (while the semantics of the
progressive or passive remain intact).
A natural account:• Reduced relatives are environments that appear to lack full clausal structure – particularly
T0 (Williams, 1975, et seq.).
15

Spanish, a language with uniform have-perfects, forms an apparent exception to this generalization, as perfect
reduced relatives can be formed with unaccusative verbs. The participle in such cases shows subject agreement notfound in a full clausal perfect, however (Iatridou et al., 2003), indicating that a different structure may underly such
constructions.

17• If be is triggered only by the presence of stranded features, this is exactly the environment
in which we would expect no auxiliary to occur: the semantics of aspect or voice are provided
by Asp0 or Voice0 , but the absence of T0 means that no tense features are stranded.
The absence of reduced relatives with have:• Following Freeze (1992) and Kayne (1993), I assume that non-be auxiliaries – specifically have– involve additional material in the position that would otherwise be realized as be.
◦ stranded [infl : F ] −→ be◦ stranded [infl : F ] + X −→ have
• The lack of non-be reduced relatives suggests that this additional material X requires licensing
or realization by some [infl : F ].
• Note that reduced relatives with an uninflected V0 are likewise impossible, suggesting that
V0 , like the element X, requires inflectional licensing: *[The children eat the cake] are happy

7

Conclusion• This talk has outlined an approach to auxiliaries that claims they are morphological realizations of “stranded” inflection.
• This unified two superficially very different patterns of auxiliary use: the additive patternof languages like English, Basque, and Finnish, and the overflow pattern of languages like
Kinande, Latin, and Arabic.
• If generally successful, this approach turns auxiliary constructions into a structural diagnostic
that can illuminate properties of the inflectional domain of the clause.

18

References
Adger, David. 2003. Core Syntax . Oxford University Press New York.
Aoun, Joseph E., Lina Choueiri, and Elabbas Benmamoun. 2010. The syntax of Arabic. Cambridge
University Press.
Arregi, Karlos. 2000. Tense in Basque. Ms. MIT.
Arregi, Karlos. 2004. The have/be alternation in Basque. Ms. University of Illinois at Urbana
Champaign.
Baker, Mark C. 2008. The syntax of agreement and concord . Cambridge University Press.
Benmamoun, Elabbas. 1999. Arabic morphology: The central role of the imperfective. Lingua
108:175–201.
Benmamoun, Elabbas. 2000. The feature structure of functional categories: A comparative study ofArabic dialects. Oxford University Press.
Bobaljik, Jonathan. 1995. Morphosyntax: The syntax of verbal inflection. Doctoral Dissertation,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Carnie, Andrew, and Eithne Guilfoyle. 2000. The syntax of verb initial languages. USA: Oxford
University Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic structures. The Hague, Mouton.
Chomsky, Noam. 1993. A minimalist program for linguistic theory. In The View from Building 20:
Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger , ed. Ken Hale and Samuel J. Keyser, 1–52.
MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1998. Minimalist inquiries: the framework. MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics
15.
Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect: an introduction to the study of verbal aspect and related problems.
Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cowper, Elizabeth A. 2010. Auxiliary Verb Insertion. Handout from ACL/CLA Conference.
Dahl, Östen. 1985. Tense and aaspect systems. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Embick, David. 2000. Features, syntax, and categories in the Latin perfect. Linguistic Inquiry
31:185–230.
Embick, David, and Rolf Noyer. 2001. Movement operations after syntax. Linguistic Inquiry
32:555–595.
Emonds, Joseph E. 1978. The verbal complex V’-V in french. Linguistic Inquiry 21:49–77.
Fassi Fehri, Abdelkader. 1993. Issues in the structure of arabic clauses and words. Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Freeze, Ray. 1992. Existentials and other locatives. Language 68:553–595.
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1966. Language universals: With special reference to feature hierarchies. The
Hague: Mouton & Co.
Haegeman, Liliane, and Terje Lohndal. 2010. Negative concord and (multiple) agree: a case studyof West Flemish. Linguistic Inquiry 41:181–211.
Hartman, Jeremy. 2010. The semantic uniformity of traces. Linguistic Inquiry 42.
Iatridou, Sabine, Elena Anagnostopoulou, and Roumyana Izvorski. 2003. Observations about theform and meaning of the Perfect. In Perfect explorations, ed. Artemis Alexiadou, Monika Rathert,
and Arnim von Stechow, volume 2 of Interface Explorations, 153–204. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Iatridou, Sabine, and Hedde Zeijlstra. 2010. Modals, negation, and polarity. Sinn und Bedeutung
15, Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrucken, September 9-11.
Jakobson, Roman. 1939. Signe zéro. In Mélanges de linguistique offerts a Charles Bally, 143–152.
Georg et Cie. S.A.
19

Karawani, Hadil, and Hedde Zeijlstra. 2010. The semantic contribution of the past morpheme inpalestinian counterfactuals. Handout, Workshop on Tense and Aspect in Generative Grammar.
Lisbon, Portugal, July 1–2, 2010.
Kayne, Richard S. 1993. Toward a modular theory of auxiliary selection. Studia Linguistica 47:3–31.
Krause, Cornelia. 2001. On reduced relatives with genitive subjects. Doctoral Dissertation, MIT.
Laka, Itziar. 1993. The structure of inflection: A case study in X0 syntax. In Generative studies inbasque linguistics, ed. J. I. Hualde and J. Ortiz de Urbina, 21—70. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lasnik, Howard. 1981. Restricting the theory of transformations: A case study. In Explanationin linguistics: The logical problem of language acquisition, ed. Norbert Hornstein and DavidLightfoot, 152–173. London: Longman.
Lasnik, Howard. 1995. Verbal morphology: Syntactic structures meets the Minimalist Program.
In Evolution and revolution in linguistic theory: Essays in honor of Carlos Otero, ed. Héctor
Campos and Paula Kempchinsky, 251–275. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
Lasnik, Howard. 1997. A gap in an ellipsis paradigm: Some theoretical implications. Linguistic
Analysis 27:166–185.
Lasnik, Howard. 2000. Syntactic structures revisited: Contemporary lectures on classic transformational theory. The MIT press.
Lechner, Winfried. 2006. An interpretive effect of head movement. Phases of interpretation 45–71.
Marvin, Tatjana. 2002. Past participles in reduced relatives. In Proceedings of ConSOLE IX , ed.
Marjo van Koppen, Erica Thrift, Erik Jan van der Torre, and Malte Zimmermann, 141–156.
Matushansky, Ora. 2006. Head movement in linguistic theory. Linguistic Inquiry 37:69–109.
Merchant, Jason. 2011. Aleut case matters. In Pragmatics and autolexical grammar: In honor of
Jerry Sadock , ed. Etsuyo Yuasa Yuasa, Tista Bagchi, and Katharine P. Beals, 382–411. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Mohammad, Mohammad. 1988. On the parallelism between IP and DP. In Proceedings of WCCFL
VII , ed. Hagit Borer, volume 7, 241–254.
Nurse, Derek. 2008. Tense and aspect in Bantu. USA: Oxford University Press.
Olsen, Mari B. 1997. A semantic and pragmatic model of lexical and grammatical aspect. New
York: Garland Publishing.
Pesetsky, David, and Esther Torrego. 2002. Tense, Case, and the nature of syntactic categories. In
The syntax of time, ed. Jacqeline Guéron and Jacqueline Lecarme. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pesetsky, David, and Esther Torrego. 2007. The syntax of valuation and the interpretability offeatures. In Phrasal and clausal architecture: Syntactic derivation and interpretation. In honor ofJoseph E. Emonds, ed. S. Karimi, V. Samiian, and W. Wilkins, 262–294. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Pollock, Jean-Yves. 1989. Verb movement, universal grammar, and the structure of IP. Linguistic
Inquiry 20:365–424.
de Rijk, R. P. G. 2007. Standard Basque: A progressive grammar . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rizzi, Luigi. 1990. Relativized minimality. MIT Press.
Schütze, Carson T. 2003. When is a verb not a verb? Nordlyd 31:400–415.
Williams, Edwin. 1975. Small clauses in English. In Syntax and semantics, ed. J. Kimball, volume 4,
249–273. New York: Academic Press.
Wurmbrand, Susi. 2011. Reverse agree. Lecture Notes, Spring 2011 Seminar.
Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2010. There is only one way to agree. Talk given at GLOW 33, Wroclaw, Poland.

20