Auxiliaire de modalité et complément adverbial

In a Lexique-Grammaire framework, Annie Meunier analyzes the sequence Paul a eu l'honnetete d'intervenir , which conveys a modality parallel to the one expressed by par N (par honnetete) . The first sequence presents certain properties. It carries tense inflections before an infinitival predicate. It also carries a negation mark extended over the entire sentence. The insertion of this modality within the predicate evoked the term auxiliary. Meunier enumerates the properties of the two modalities and the constraints imposed on their usage. It is suggested that the two modalities can be considered modal auxiliaries of a « psychological » nature in the sense of Gross 1975 (table 1). She further demonstrates that despite the differences, the two modalities display semantic and distributional similarities.