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Lexical auxiliaries in Spanish: How and why?

  • Hella Olbertz EMAIL logo
From the journal Linguistics

Abstract

Departing from a proposal by Keizer on how to bridge the gap between the grammar and the lexicon in Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), this article deals with three aspectual verbal periphrases in Spanish, which are, in the order of their degrees of grammaticalization, (i) weakly grammaticalized resultative tener+participle, (ii) egressive parar de+infinitive and (iii) strongly grammaticalized habitual soler+infinitive. In spite of their different syntactic behaviors, none of them is a truly lexical or truly grammatical item. After a detailed description of the syntax and semantics of these auxiliary constructions in comparison with truly auxiliary constructions, the article discusses the proposal by García Velasco (this issue) for the lexicon in FDG. This serves as a starting point for the development of the concept of lexical auxiliaries, which is then applied to the three periphrastic constructions. The representation of these constructions in FDG makes use of “combinations of partially instantiated frames,” introduced by Keizer (this issue), and adequately reflects the meanings and the morphosyntactic structure of lexical auxiliaries.

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the valuable comments I was given by the participants of the Workshop on the lexicon in Functional Discourse Grammar in Vienna, as well as the comments by Daniel García Velasco, Inge Genee, Evelien Keizer, Josefien Sweep, and two anonymous reviewers on earlier versions of this article. All remaining shortcomings are mine. Part of this article was written during a one-year stay at the São Paulo State University, financed by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), grant no. 2014/00034‒5.

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Published Online: 2016-8-20
Published in Print: 2016-9-1

©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton

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