ERIC Number: EJ877442
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2004
Pages: 18
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0155-0640
EISSN: N/A
Auxiliary Verbs, Dictionaries and the Late Evolution of the Italian Language
Kinder, John J.
Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, Series S n18 p115-132 2004
The use of BE as an auxiliary verb with intransitive verbs has declined in all the Romance languages over the past five centuries. Today, Spanish and Portuguese use only HAVE, in Catalan and Romanian BE occurs in marginal contexts, and in French, BE is used with approximately 40 verbs. Italian is a notable exception, since BE is still used as the auxiliary of nearly 300 intransitive verbs, as well as with all transitives in the passive and with all reflexives. This well-known fact is a notorious source of difficulty for language teachers and students, partly because there have been few adequate descriptions or even taxonomies of the semantic classes of intransitive verbs which take BE. This paper reports an attempt to describe the selection of auxiliary verbs in Italian in terms of contemporary dictionaries of Italian. The paper offers a description of auxiliary selection based on the Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy proposed by Sorace (2000), using some recent monolingual dictionaries as sources. This raises some issues about the use of dictionaries as source material for grammatical descriptions. (Contains 1 table.)
Descriptors: Semantics, Verbs, Monolingualism, Dictionaries, Italian, Language Usage, Romance Languages, Second Language Learning, Second Language Instruction, Grammar, Information Sources
Applied Linguistics Association of Australia. Available from: Monash University ePress. Building 4, Monash University, Wellington Road, Clayton 3800, Victoria, Australia. Fax: +61-3-9905 8450; e-mail: epress@lib.monash.edu.au; Web site: http://publications.epress.monash.edu/loi/aral
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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