English Auxiliaries as Tense Innections

The standard view of English reduced auxiliaries takes them to be (postlexical) clitics (Kaisse 1983). However, Spencer (1991) puts forward some persuasive arguments that a subset of these forms, the non-syllabic reduced auxiliaries, are actually aaxes (tense innec-tions) rather than clitics, while the syllabic reduced auxiliaries are post-lexical clitics. We accept the logic of Spencer's position, which maintains a clear separation between syntactic and morphological constituency and selection, and tolerates a mismatch between syntax and morphology. That is we accept that morphological and syntactic \wordhood" need not coincide. The aim of this paper is modest: we show how the architecture of LFG permits a simple and intuitive analysis of non-syllabic reduced auxiliaries. The analysis avoids compromising the principles of lexical integrity and phonology-free syntax but permits us to view the pronoun and the nite innection as making separate contributions to the (syntactic) functional structure of the sentence. The account makes use of an inside-out equation to express the contribution of the tense aax to the f-structure of the sentence. If this analysis and the descriptive work it builds on, (Spencer 1991), is correct, we must accept the existence of tense-innected pronouns in English.