Abstract
The cross-linguistic investigation of auxiliaries reveals that certain types of meanings are expressed by members of that category with nothing short of amazing regularity.1 Steele (1980) reports that one routinely finds tense, aspect, negation, modality, assertability conditions, question, and emphasis expressed in the AUX, to the exclusion of practically all other notions. While this may appear to encompass a fairly wide range of meaning, it is in fact quite narrow if one reflects on the range of possibilities, and linguistic theory should ultimately give an account of this. In a sense, we are confronted with a rather constant relationship between certain meanings and certain forms, and in the end will have to elucidate some principled connection between linguistic form and linguistic meaning. This runs counter to much in modern linguistics which emphasizes the arbitrary nature of language, both in terms of sound-meaning relations as well as whatever semantic content syntactic categories might hold. But, in the case of auxiliaries at least, there does appear to be semantic content to the category AUX, for not just anything is expressible as an auxiliary.
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Carlson, G.N. (1983). Marking Constituents. In: Heny, F., Richards, B. (eds) Linguistic Categories: Auxiliaries and Related Puzzles. Synthese Language Library, vol 19. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6989-6_4
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