English Auxiliaries Without Lexical Rules

English auxiliaries show a complex but systematic set of interrelationships between their characteristic construction types. This chapter gives an account of the grammar of these characteristic constructions in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), without using lexical rules or movements interrelating structures, but relying solely on the organization of information within an inheritance hierarchy to make relevant generalizations. The chapter is a development of the lexicalist analysis of auxiliaries given in Warner. The interrelationships proposed between structures are radically different since they are constrained by the need to state them within a hierarchy of unifiable information, whereas lexical rules permit what looks to the practicing grammarian like a more potent ability to manipulate relationships between feature structures. The chapter provides a rather simple and convincing formal analysis of auxiliaries, which appropriately generates their characteristic structures, and integrates the account of negation with an account of scope. Keywords: English auxiliaries; Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG); inheritance hierarchy; lexical rules