ABSTRACT
In this chapter we propose a syntactic and semantic analysis of auxiliary chains in Spanish. Spanish features the property of being able to concatenate up to five (sometimes even more) auxiliary verbs, and these sequences have gone largely unnoticed in the literature. Our hypothesis stems from the idea expressed in Bravo et al. (2015) and subsequent works that the class of Spanish auxiliary verbs must be divided in two groups: lexical auxiliary verbs and functional auxiliary verbs. In order to provide an appropriate analysis of dependencies within auxiliary chains, we revisit the concept of the syntactic cycle in generative grammar and the notion of locality formulable in phrase structure models. We will provide evidence that both structure building and chunking need to be sensitive to the semantic content of lexical terminals involved in syntactic operations.
