The Syntactic Structure of Romanian Auxiliary and Modal Verbs

Romanian auxiliary verbs exhibit certain peculiar properties that set them aside from other Romance counterparts. It will be suggested that the di erences between Romanian auxiliaries and French and Italian auxiliaries can be accounted for in terms of di erent syntactic structures. While in French and in Italian the auxiliary verb, the non nite one and the complements combine in a at structure, in Romanian, the auxiliary and the lexical verb form a compound structure. If this structure is assumed, it is possible to account for the properties of Romanian auxiliaries and for the fact that they can be placed after the verbal complement, in certain registers. Furthermore, it will be shown that the Romanian data argue in favor of a monoclausal auxiliary structure and against the biclausal con guration proposed in Dobrovie-Sorin 1994. She assumes that auxiliaries should be analyzed as adjoined to a cp/ip category and that the In node and the np subject position of the main clause are lacking. However, the fact that no element can intervene between the auxiliary and the verbal complement and the distribution of clitics seem to support a monoclausal con guration. Auxiliary verbs di er from modal verbs like a putea (`can') in certain respects. It will be shown that these di erences can be accounted for if the modal verb is associated with a at structure. On the other hand, the similarities with respect to the distribution of clitics follow as consequence of argument composition. This is a lexical mechanism according to which the auxiliary inherits the complements of the embedded verb,