The Dependency Status of Function Words: Auxiliaries

The Universal Stanford Dependencies (USD) subordinates function words to content words. Auxiliaries, adpositions and subordinators are positioned as dependents of full verbs and nouns, respectively. Such an approach to the syntax of natural languages is contrary to most work in theoretical syntax in the past 35 years, regardless of whether this work is constituencyor dependency-based. A substantial amount of evidence delivers a strong argument for the more conventional approach, which subordinates full verbs to auxiliaries and nouns to adpositions. This contribution demonstrates that the traditional approach to the dependency status of auxiliary verbs is motivated by many empirical considerations, and hence USD cannot be viewed as modeling the syntax of natural languages in a plausible way. 1 The dependency status of function words The Universal Stanford Dependencies (USD), as presented in de Marneffe et al. (2014), advocates a scheme for parsing natural languages that categorically subordinates function words to content words. Auxiliary verbs, adpositions (prepositions and postpositions), subordinators (subordinate conjunctions), etc. are subordinated to the content words with which they co-occur. A more traditional dependency-based analysis assumes the opposite, i.e. most function words dominate the content words with which they co-occur. 1 The following diagrams illustrate both approaches: 1 Determiners are one area of disagreement among linguists. (1) waiting V(Aux)