Eckhard Bick - VISL

emoving e.g. querer from the modal list, as well as precisar and some others from the
list of preposition mediated auxiliaries.
Another clausality test is the passivisation test (i), as proposed in Perini (1989)
for detecting an interfering clause boundary in the verb chain. Again, ir passes the test
(1a), querer fails it (2a):
(1) Pedro vai comer o frango. (1a) O frango vai ser comido por Pedro.
(1b) *Comer o frango é ido por Pedro.
(2) Pedro quer comer o frango. (2a) *O frango quer ser comido por Pedro.
(2b) Comer o frango é querido por Pedro.
The passivisation test is also a transparency test like (f) and (g): For ir, the verb chain is
transparent, suggesting auxiliarity, and ’comer o frango’ cannot be isolated as @ACC
and made the subject of a corresponding passive clause (1b). With querer, the verb
chain is not transparent, and ’comer o frango’ can be made subject of passive (2b). The
passivisation test subsumes a number of other tests:
• it tests for patient case role (PAT) in the subject, since this would disallow another
(object) PAT in the same clause, and contradict a ’por X’ agent of passive constituent
in the passivised clause.
• it implies lack of selection restrictions (test c), since in the passivised clause the same
verb has to ”tolerate” a different subject. Many concatenating verbs are cognitive
verbs (admitir, adorar, decidir, negar) select for +HUM subjects creating a
passivisation conflict with –HUM objects.
• it implies lack of imperative (test d), since PAT subjects imply lack of the control
(CONTR) feature.
Between the extremes of accepting all concatenating verbs as auxiliaries (a) or
restricting the category to ser, ter and ir (g), we have now 2 sets of tests that come up
with 2 more or less coherent lists of auxiliary candidates:
1. subject identity test, backed by the pronoun fronting criterion, the two of which
yield the same results for chains without prepositions (GER, PCP, INF), but differ
somewhat in the case of preposition mediation, where the pronoun fronting criterion
is ”soft”.
2. passivisation test, backed by the finite subclause substitution test and +PAT, –
CONTR and lack of selection restrictions for the subject.
As can be seen from the overview of concatenating verbs in the parser’s lexicon (end of
chapter), the auxiliary set 2 is a subset of auxiliary set 1. The reason is, of course, that
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