Onthecategoryofauxiliary in Modern Hebrew*

THIS STUDY considers some of the categories commonly associated with the notion ''auxiliary'' from the point of view of Modern Hebrew. As background, a characterization of auxiliaries as syntactically and semantically DEPENDENT elements is suggested (Section I. I), and an attempt is made to show why many Hebrew studies to date have taken rather too unconstrained a view of the notion by extending it to virtually all verbs requiring an infinitival complement (Section 1.2). There then follows a review of the syntactic patterning of semantic categories typically included under the general heading of "auxiliaries," specifically Tense (Section 2), Modality (Section 3 ), and Aspect (Section 4), in an attempt to motivate the claim presented here that there is only one clear case of an auxiliary verb in Modern Hebrew-haya 'be' -as a marker of durative and perfective aspect and of conditional mood (Section 4.3). Worth noting here is the point made by Akmajian, Steele and Wasow in their recent analysis of the category AUX in universal grammar; they observe that ''an important confusion exists in the literature between the category AUX on the one hand and auxiliary verbs on the other" (1979, p.3). The concern in this present discussion is specifically with the nature and role of auxiliary