How to explain partly grammaticalized auxiliaries and represent them in Functional Discourse Grammar

What is it about?

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 "tene"r+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” and adequately reflects the meanings and the morphosyntactic structure of lexical auxiliaries.

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Why is it important?

It is important to be able to exactly describe grammatical phenomena that do not straightforwardly in one specific category. Although the aim is to describe the properties of any linguistic phenomenon in use, it is important to be able to formalize them in order to make this description as exactly as possible. The exact description of phenomena helps both to increase the existing knowledge about languages and to improve language teaching and learning.

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