Auxiliary Selection in Italian: A Comment on Miozzo and Caramazza's On Knowing the Auxiliary of a Verb that Cannot Be Named: Evidence for the Independence of Grammatical and Phonological Aspects of Lexical Knowledge

In a paper published in the 9:1 issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Miozzo and Caramazza report the case of an anomic Italian patient (Dante) who is able to retrieve a verb’s auxiliary despite being unable to retrieve the verb’s phonological form. Because the authors assume that auxiliary selection in Italian is determined solely by arbitrary syntactic features of verbs, they interpret Dante’s performance as indicating that the syntactic features of verbs can be accessed independently of their phonological features. The purpose of this short comment is to argue that the authors’ conclusion is invalid because their assumption that auxiliary selection is purely syntactic is mistaken; Van Valin (1990) has shown that auxiliary selection can be derived directly from the semantic properties of verbs. I will arst summarize Miozzo and Caramazza’s study in greater detail, then I will review the evidence that auxiliary selection is semantically based, and anally I will discuss the implications of this evidence for Miozzo and Caramazza’s claims. Previous research has demonstrated that Dante has signiacant difaculty retrieving the phonological forms of nouns but does not have any trouble retrieving the syntactic features of nouns, such as gender (Badecker, Miozzo, & Zanuttini, 1995). The main goal of Miozzo and Caramazza’s study was to determine whether this phenomenon extends to verbs. They point out that “in order to determine whether the syntactic features of a verb can be accessed independently of other properties of the word, it has to be shown that these features are not derivable from the verb’s semantic properties, its phonology, or the context in which the word is used.” Following Burzio (1986), they assume that auxiliary selection satisaes these conditions. There are two auxiliaries in Italian that are used to form perfect tenses, avere and essere (have and be). Transitive verbs always take avere, whereas intransitive verbs vary as to whether they take avere or essere, as shown below: