Incorporating Contracted Auxiliaries in English a Collection of Papers on Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Spencer (1991) and Sadler (1997) argue that there are two diierent phenomena that have been grouped together as`contracted auxiliaries'. On the one hand are the syllabic reduced auxiliaries that are unselective in what they attach to. On the other hand, there are nonsyllabic reduced auxiliaries that exhibit lexical idiosyncrasy, stem allomorphy, and word-internal phonological processes. Sadler (1997:1{2) illustrates the two classes with data like those in (1){(2): 1 Spencer and Sadler both propose to treat the syllabic reduced auxiliaries (1) as clitics. Their proposal regarding the nonsyllabic reduced auxiliaries (2), on the other hand, is to treat them as aaxes attached to the prior pronominal. Sadler also claims that the syllabic forms are not 1 Judgments of ungrammaticality reported in this paper are based on intuitions about`normal' rate speech. In fast speech, some of the examples we starred may well occur. However, we believe that the intuitive contrasts still stand, if only in slower speech, and therefore must be accounted for.