Morphologie autonome et morphologie verbale du français : une représentation de l'auxiliaire

Within a Generative framework, specifically the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995) combined with what is known as Distributed Morphology theory, Picabia presents a description of verbal inflections thereby offering a syntactic analysis of auxiliary verbs in French. She discusses the status of the auxiliary, which is largely studied by French grammarians. Picabia raises the question whether auxiliary verbs form a lexical or a functional category. In order to demonstrate her point of view, she develops an analysis of avoir et aller, two verbs that can be considered close to functional category, and whose auxiliarity is undoubted.