Basic English Grammar with Exercises

Aspectual Auxiliary Verbs

event (the treaty being signed). It is the latter interpretation that is relevant here as this
clearly involves a predication-like structure that simply lacks tense, similar to the
examples in (161). Of course, the important observation is that here we have a passive
construction involving a passive morpheme, but no passive auxiliary. This indicates
that the function of the passive auxiliary is to bear an inflection rather than to add any
semantic content.
Given the similarity between the passive construction and those constructions
involving aspectual elements, it seems likely that they should receive a similar
analysis. From this perspective, it is the aspectual morpheme that carries the semantic
content and the associated auxiliary is merely a dummy inserted to bear another
morpheme that the verb is prevented from bearing by the aspectual morpheme itself.

3.2 The nature of the aspectual morpheme

Taking the similarity of the passive morpheme and aspectual morphemes one step
further, we might argue that aspectual morphemes are another kind of light verb,
which is not surprising as light verbs can affect the aspectual interpretation of the
structure they are included in. The Urdu example given above and repeated here for
convenience, uses a light verb lene ‘take’ to indicate the perfective status of the event
described:

(165) nadyane saddafko xat lik lene diya
Nadya-erg. Saddaf-dat. letter write take-inf. give-perf.Masc.s
‘Nadya let Saddaf write a letter (completely)’

The analysis of the aspectual structure of English might therefore be as follows:

(166) a vP b vP

v' v'

v VP v VP

ing DP V' en DP V'

the door V the door V

close close