Introduction

This book aims to give an account of the grammar and history of English auxiliaries, that is of words like those italicized here:

(1) Could John have written it if Mary didn't? – No, it wasn ‘t written by a man.

Since this group includes words associated with modality, aspect, tense and voice (as in could, have, didn't, wasn't) they have often been labelled ‘auxiliary’ or ‘helping’ verbs, where an auxiliary is ‘a verb used to form the tenses, moods, voices, etc. of other verbs’ (OED Auxiliary, a. and sb. B sb. 3). This terminology encodes the traditional view that such properties are fundamentally those of verbs, as they are (for example) in the Latin one-word forms cantabo, cantarem, cantabatur in contrast with the corresponding English (I) shall sing, (I) might sing, (it) was being sung.

The problems of the present-day analysis and the historical development of this group of words have been a major area for discussion and disagreement in recent years. In this book I will present and justify new analyses in both structure and history. In the first half of the book I will argue that the most appropriate characterization of some of the major idiosyncrasies of the English auxiliary system follows directly from the nature of the categorial relationship between auxiliary and full verb. Auxiliaries do not share morphosyntactic generalizations appropriate to full verbs. Instead we need a fundamentally lexical account of the interrelationships between their categories. This insight leads to a fresh and illuminating account of ordering restrictions on English auxiliaries, of restrictions on the availability of their morphosyntactic categories, of their distribution in ellipsis and of some other individual properties.