English Auxiliaries Research Articles

Investigating EFL Libyan students problems in translating English Auxiliary verbs in declarative Sentences, Case study: English Department Alasmarya University

This study is an attempt to shed light on the issue of translating English auxiliary verbs in declarative sentences into Arabic. It aims to identify the students’ problems in translating English auxiliary verbs into Arabic. In addition, it aims to examine the extent to which the translation courses taught at the faculty affect students' translations. To achieve these aims, the researchers use a test of translation for data collection. The test includes 20 statements including auxiliary verbs. The sample is 40 English Foreign language (EFL) students at the Faculty of Arts, al-Asmariya Islamic University, Zliten. The results of this research show that the students committed different types of errors in translating English auxiliaries into Arabic such as wrong equivalents in translation and omitting the equivalence. Furthermore, the results of the study reveal that the percentage of the correct and acceptable translations of the group who have not studied any translation courses and the percentage of the other group who have studied one or more translation courses are approximately the same. In words, the translation courses do not affect the student’s proficiency in translation.

Double modals in contemporary British and Irish speech

This article reports on the use of double modals, a non-standard syntactic feature, in the contemporary speech of the UK and Ireland. Most data on the geographic extent of the feature and its combinatorial types come from surveys or acceptability ratings or from older attestations focused on northern England, Scotland or Northern Ireland, with relatively few attestations in naturalistic data and from England and Wales. Manual verification of double modals in a large corpus of geolocated Automatic Speech Recognition transcripts from YouTube videos of local government channels from the UK and Ireland shows that the feature exhibits a larger inventory of combinatorial types than has previously been found and is attested in speech from throughout the UK and Ireland. The development may be related to ongoing changes in the semantic space occupied by modal auxiliaries in English.

Exploring Modality Markers in Political Speeches and their Pedagogical Implications

The variety of meaning and function of the modal auxiliaries lead to an issue in relation to many speeches especially the political ones. This research aims at highlighting the modal auxiliaries in English and show their usage in conveying meaning; checkout the applicability of Randolph Quirk and Green Baum’s modal of modality to political speeches; and find out the main functions of the English modals (will and must) in relation to the occasion of political speeches and how to utilize these functions pedagogically.This research hypothesizes that English modal auxiliaries (will and must) play an important role in carrying meaning in political speeches; and that Randolph Quirk Green Baum is an applicable model to political speeches in relation to modality. Finally, there is a significant pedagogical implication in raising the EFL Learners’ awareness in relation to the usage of modal auxiliaries and their accurate manipulation.

A Corpus-Based Study of Deontic Modality in Legal Discourse

This article contributes to the study of English deontic modal means as a key linguistic phenomenon. It responds to the need of a systematic analysis of English deontic modal auxiliaries used in international legal documents of various genres. Deontic modality is studied as a conceptual category from the semantic perspective. Deontic modals that express permission, obligation and prohibition are treated with special attention to the applicability to Legal English. The corpus includes UN documents of five legal genres: the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Statute of the International Court of Justice, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism. These texts were selected to identify frequency, distribution and semantic content of modal auxiliaries which express permission, obligation and prohibition in legal discourse. The aim to reveal similarities and differences in the use of deontic modal auxiliaries in General English and Legal English has been also set.

Contrast, Contact, Convergence? Afrikaans and English Modal Auxiliaries in South African Parliamentary Discourse (1925–1985)

Abstract This article investigates modal auxiliaries in original and translated Afrikaans and South African English parliamentary discourse in the period 1925–1985. Against the background of the sociolinguistic history of language contact in the bilingual South African parliament (1910–1994), it analyses (a) the contrastive differences in the use of modal auxiliaries in South African English and Afrikaans, (b) potential cross-linguistic influence in the use of modals between the two languages, and (c) the way in which contrastive differences and cross-linguistic influence are reflected in translations. In both languages, modal auxiliaries are more common in parliamentary discourse than in general usage. There is little evidence of overall convergence; there are, however, cross-linguistic similarities in specific pragmatic uses of modals in parliament. Translations show a large degree of shining-through from the source text, alongside adjustment to target norms; the tension between these two forces is variable, and influenced by social factors.

Review of W. NEY (1981): Semantic Structures for the Syntax of Complements and Auxiliaries in English

Review of W. NEY (1981): Semantic Structures for the Syntax of Complements and Auxiliaries in English

Grammatical and Syntactical Functions of Auxiliaries in English and Urdu

The current study investigates grammatical and syntactical functions of auxiliaries in Urdu and English to draw certain distinctions regarding the behavior, syntactic representation and semantic content auxiliaries add to the main verbs (Vs) through the X-bar theory as a theoretical framework within the minimalist program (MP). The data of the current research were collected from authentic sources (Urdu and English text books and grammars) to consider a diverse range of possible usage of Urdu and English auxiliaries. 200 sentences extracted from textbooks and grammars were analyzed grammatically in terms of morphology, and syntax (through tree-representation and their movement). The findings indicate sharp differences related to the syntactic position of auxiliaries in Urdu and English. In Urdu, auxiliaries always occupy their position after the main verbs in a sentence and their position is fixed and also have the ability to mark number (singular & plural) and gender (masculine & feminine). In contrast, English auxiliaries can only mark number. Another sharp difference is observed in the question formation process. In Urdu, unlike English, auxiliaries cannot be moved from its latent position towards the specifier position at the beginning of the sentence to construct question structures, because, if it happens, the sentence is considered ungrammatical which may result in the violation of MP. The findings of the study would prove helpful for understanding the semantic, grammatical and syntactical nature and behavior of auxiliaries comparatively in Urdu and English.

Variation in auxiliary to T movement: evidence from adverbs

Adverb positions have been used to assess whether or not a language undergoes verb movement [e.g. Pollock, Jean-Yves. 1989. Verb movement, universal grammar, and the structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry 20(3), 365–424; Roberts, Ian. 1993. Verbs and diachronic syntax. A comparative history of English and French. Dordrecht: Kluwer.; Ayoun, Dalila. 2005. Verb movement phenomena in Spanish: “mixed languages” and bilingualism. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press]. These adverbs are argued to be base-generated in the specifier positions of specific phrases; therefore, any word order variation is due to verbal head movement [e.g. Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads: A cross-linguistic perspective. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; Alexiadou, Artemis. 1997. Adverb placement: A case study in asymmetric syntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins]. In earlier stages of English, all verbs moved to a higher position, namely tense (T); however, in present English, only auxiliary verbs are still capable of moving to T. This shift in movement constraints is attributed to a loss in agreement features on main verbs, whereas the English auxiliaries are morphologically richer and still exhibit movement. This paper analyzes the interaction of TP adverbs and auxiliaries in spoken corpus data in order to provide empirical evidence to support the claim that English speakers prefer auxiliary movement to T. It finds auxiliary movement occurs but there is a variation between auxiliary have and be. Auxiliary have moves less frequently above higher adverb probably than it does above lower adverb always, whereas auxiliary be consistently moves to T regardless of adverb. The hypothesis is that movement varies because auxiliary have is less morphologically rich in comparison to auxiliary be.

Lessons from the English auxiliary system

The English auxiliary system exhibits many lexical exceptions and subregularities, and considerable dialectal variation, all of which are frequently omitted from generative analyses and discussions. This paper presents a detailed, movement-free account of the English Auxiliary System within Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2010, Michaelis 2011, Boas & Sag 2012) that utilizes techniques of lexicalist and construction-based analysis. The resulting conception of linguistic knowledge involves constraints that license hierarchical structures directly (as in context-free grammar), rather than by appeal to mappings over such structures. This allows English auxiliaries to be modeled as a class of verbs whose behavior is governed by general and class-specific constraints. Central to this account is a novel use of the featureaux, which is set both constructionally and lexically, allowing for a complex interplay between various grammatical constraints that captures a wide range of exceptional patterns, most notably the vexing distribution of unstresseddo, and the fact that Ellipsis can interact with other aspects of the analysis to produce the feeding and blocking relations that are needed to generate the complex facts of EAS. The present approach, superior both descriptively and theoretically to existing transformational approaches, also serves to undermine views of the biology of language and acquisition such as Berwick et al. (2011), which are centered on mappings that manipulate hierarchical phrase structures in a structure-dependent fashion.

Syntactic Variation and Auxiliary Contraction: The Surprising Case of Scots

This article is concerned with the distribution of contracted auxiliaries in English, in particular the re- striction against their occurrence in the immediate context of a gap created by movement or ellipsis. We document apparent exceptions to this restriction in varieties of Scots, all occurring in what we call the LOCATIVE DISCOVERY EXPRESSION. We analyse these as mirative constructions, and using new data from the Scots Syntax Atlas we describe patterns of variation in the acceptance of auxiliary contractions in locative discovery expressions which provide clues as to the role of syntax in conditioning auxiliary contraction. Adapting the proposal in Wilder (1997), where contracted auxiliaries are prosodically incorporated into the following predicate, we provide an account in which the differences across dialects with respect to contraction are explained in terms of the availability of different abstract structures.

Syntactic variation and auxiliary contraction: The surprising case of Scots

This article is concerned with the distribution of contracted auxiliaries in English, in particular the restriction against their occurrence in the immediate context of a gap created by movement or ellipsis. We document apparent exceptions to this restriction in varieties of Scots, all occurring in what we call the locative discovery expression. We analyze these as mirative constructions, and using new data from the Scots Syntax Atlas, we describe patterns of variation in the acceptance of auxiliary contractions in locative discovery expressions that provide clues as to the role of syntax in conditioning auxiliary contraction. Adapting the proposal in Wilder 1997, where contracted auxiliaries are prosodically incorporated into the following predicate, we provide an account in which the differences across dialects with respect to contraction are explained in terms of the availability of different abstract structures.

How a Construction Grammar account solves the auxiliary controversy

Abstract The English auxiliaries have been a matter of dispute for decades with two opposing views: one analysis treats them as main verbs that take a VP complement; the other considers them as feature carriers. Proponents of both approaches have convincingly pointed out each other’s weaknesses without however settling the debate and without accounting for the fact that the English VP is still evolving today. The goal of this paper is to show that Construction Grammar offers a way out of the current status quo. This claim is substantiated by a computational formalization of the English verb phrase in Fluid Construction Grammar that includes a bi-directional processing model for formulation and comprehension available for online testing.

A Force-Dynamic Approach to Modal Auxiliaries in English

A Force-Dynamic Approach to Modal Auxiliaries in English

영어 양상조동사 습득에 나타난 문법-화용능력 관계 연구

영어 양상조동사 습득에 나타난 문법-화용능력 관계 연구

Harris, Chomsky and the origins of transformational grammar

According to Chomsky’s report of the mid 1970s, he and Harris developed their theories in an essentially independent way; whereas according to some statements by Harris, some contact actually took place between them. To shed light on this issue, it may be useful to systematically compare their respective views of the notion ‘transformation’ as well as their analyses of certain syntactic phenomena. Among the topics dealt with in the present article are: the system of syntactic categories and their symbols; the notion of ‘zero elements’; the phenomenon of discontinuous constituents; the English auxiliary system;wh-constructions; the typology of transformations; the notions of ‘kernel’ and ‘kernel sentence’.Several of these analyses show many points of contact between the two scholars (e.g., the analysis ofwh-constructions or that of English auxiliaries), which allow us to maintain that they surely influenced each other. The overall differences between the two models are also clear: the transformational relation holds between sentences in Harris’s framework, while it holds between underlying strings on the one hand and actual sentences on the other in Chomsky’s. As a consequence of this different view of the notion of transformation, two problems which were fundamental for Chomsky had no importance for Harris, namely the order of transformations and the distinction between optional and obligatory transformations.It can therefore be concluded that, if the two scholars certainly influenced each other when they were working out their respective transformational theories, their theoretical views were acutely different almost from the beginning.

Development of Auxiliaries in Young Children Learning African American English.

We examined language samples of young children learning African American English (AAE) to determine if and when their use of auxiliaries shows dialect-universal and dialect-specific effects. The data were longitudinal language samples obtained from two children, ages 18 to 36 months, and three children, ages 33 to 51 months. Dialect-universal analyses examined age of first form and early uses of BE, DO, and modal auxiliaries. Dialect-specific analyses focused on rates of overt marking by auxiliary type and syntactic construction and for BE by surface form and succeeding element. Initial production of auxiliaries occurred between 19 and 24 months. The children's forms were initially restricted and produced in syntactically simple constructions. Over time, they were expanded in ways that showed their rates of marking to vary by auxiliary type, their rates of BE and DO marking to vary by syntactic construction, and their rates of BE marking to vary by surface form and succeeding element. Development of auxiliaries by young children learning AAE shows both dialect-universal and dialect-specific effects. The findings are presented within a development chart to guide clinicians in the assessment of children learning AAE and in the treatment of AAE-speaking children with language impairment.

The nature of the passive, with an analysis of Vietnamese

We attempt to clarify a great deal of confusion in the literature on what a passive is, and what counts as a passive in different languages. We do this through a detailed investigation of what has been identified as a passive in Vietnamese, sentences with the morphemes bị and được. We also compare these to Mandarin Chinese bei. We show that these morphemes are not passive at all: like English auxiliaries, they may occur with either an active complement or a passive one. We clarify this point and what it means to be a passive. Second, sentences with these morphemes and the corresponding sentences without them are truth-conditionally equivalent. We show that the extra meaning they convey is a type of projective, or not-at-issue, meaning that is separate from the at-issue content of the sentence. We provide a detailed syntactic and semantic analysis of Vietnamese, and give arguments for this analysis. We propose that there is no movement in Vietnamese, but there is in Chinese, and this difference accounts for differences between the two languages. We also clarify what agent-oriented adverbs of the ‘deliberately’ type show, and draw conclusions about English get passives and tough constructions.

On ineffable predicates: Bilingual Greek–English code-switching under ellipsis

Abstract In Greek–English code-switching contexts, Greek verb phrases can antecede apparent verb phrase ellipsis after English auxiliaries, even when a non-elliptical code-switched continuation with a Greek verb would not be well-formed. These facts, together with others from the previous literature, are compatible with a theory of ellipsis that posits an identity relation stated over abstract syntactic structures: mere semantic identity is too generous and fails to block sentences which are judged unacceptable.

To be or not to be elided: VP ellipsis revisited

The main question that this paper addresses is: what happens to non-finite auxiliaries under English VP ellipsis (VPE)? Do they remain overt like finite auxiliaries, or do they disappear together with lexical verbs? Akmajian and Wasow (1975) and Sag (1976) observed the following pattern: non-finite have always stays overt, being is obligatorily elided, and be and been are optionally elided. We provide an analysis for this pattern. As preliminaries for our account we follow Chomsky (1993) and Lasnik (1995b) in assuming that English auxiliaries carry uninterpretable inflectional features which force the auxiliary to raise to the relevant inflectional head for feature checking at PF. As we argue that VPE includes the progressive projections in the ellipsis site, but nothing higher, the have and being data automatically fall out: have is base-generated outside the ellipsis site, so is never elided, whilst being's landing site is inside the ellipsis site, so being is always elided. For be and been, which are base-generated in the ellipsis site and raise out of it to get their inflectional features checked, we take an optional raising approach: in non-elliptical sentences raising is obligatory, otherwise the derivation crashes at PF because of unchecked features. Ellipsis contexts, on the other hand, provide the option of not raising for be and been, because ellipsis then deletes be and been in their base positions, along with their unchecked features, avoiding the PF violation. We extend this account to other phenomena, such as VP fronting, pseudo-clefts and predicate inversion.

Rise of the Auxiliaries: a case for auxiliary raising vs. affix lowering

AbstractThe syntax of auxiliaries has given rise to much discussion in the generative literature (Akmajian and Wasow 1975; Emonds 1978; Akmajian et al. 1979; Pollock 1989; Chomsky 1993; Lasnik 1995b; Roberts 1998; Bjorkman 2011; Rouveret 2012). This paper explores the distribution of non-finite auxiliaries in Standard English, in particular the issue as to whether such auxiliaries raise for inflectional purposes or remain in their base positions and have their inflections lowered onto them.It is shown that auxiliary distribution is not determined by auxiliary type (passive, copular, progressive etc.) as the lowering accounts predict, but by the morphological form that the auxiliary takes. In particular, the auxiliaries