Auxiliary verbs in Jordanian Arabic

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There are a number of helping verbs in Jordanian Arabic that are confused with light verbs or serial verbs. This paper, first, establishes the criteria on which they have been identified as auxiliary verbs. The paper shows the similarities and differences between the inflection of lexical verbs and aux’s in JA. It also tackles the loss of θ-assigning properties which is the crucial property that differentiates between aux and lexical and serial verbs. Second, given the fact that Arabic has rich verbal morphology which provides enough justification for factoring TP into TP and AspP (and perhaps AgrP), the study adopts an articulated version of the IP, in which inflection is separated into its constituent components, each has a maximal functional projection. The study also builds on Ouhalla's proposal (1990, 2005) that auxiliaries originate outside the VP shell. Based on evidence from the distribution of VP adverbs, negation and floating quantifiers, the paper proposes that auxiliaries in Jordanian Arabic are classified under two lexical auxiliary groups. T-aux are borne in a functional projection under T, but raise to T 0 to carry and reflect tense, while Asp-aux are base-generated under Asp 0 and only raise to T in the absence of a T-Aux.