A Continuum Approach to English Verbal Affixation

This squib provides a continuum approach to English verbal affixation. There are three major approaches to the locus of verbal affixation: the lexical approach, the syntactic approach, and the hybrid approach. First of all, I advocate that the syntactic approach is on the right track, and then makes a generalization that the leftmost verbal affix position is a position for auxiliaries, while the rightmost head position--the passive en--is a position for main Vs. More precisely, I propose that the more leftward a verbal affix occurs, the more likely it is to attract an auxiliary, and the more rightward it occurs, the more likely it is to attract a main V. This continuum approach is based on the idea that there is a fixed position for auxiliary Vs and main Vs: the outer VP-shell is a position for auxiliaries, and the inner VP-shell is a position for main Vs. This paper shows that this continuum approach enables us to explain the idiosyncratic patterns displayed by English verbal affixation.