Lexical auxiliaries in Spanish: how and why?

Departing from a proposal by Keizer (2007) on how to bridge the gap between the grammar and the lexicon in Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), this paper deals with three aspectual verbal periphrases in Spanish, which are, in the order of their degrees of grammaticalization, (i) weakly grammaticalized resultative tener + participle, (ii) egressive parar de + infinitive and (iii) strongly grammaticalized habitual soler + infinitive. In spite of their different syntactic behaviours, 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 proposal by García Velasco for the lexicon in FDG (this issue) is discussed and 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’, introduced by Keizer (this issue), and adequately reflects the meanings and the morphosyntactic structure of lexical auxiliaries.