한국언어과학회

This paper investigates the verbal inflections in the aspectual field in the clause. Under Chomsky’s lexicalist-minimalist account, the tense and agreement verbal inflection is believed to be syntactically autonomous. In a similar vein, other verbal inflections like aspectual and passive forms are also treated as independent functional head. In the case of complex auxiliary constructions, the verbal inflection of auxiliary verbs consistently determines their distribution and position in the varied constructions including existential constructions, VP ellipsis, and clauses with floating quantifiers or a certain class of adverbs. Usually, a specific type of auxiliary verb does not condition its distribution and position. All the nonfinite forms of auxiliary verbs do not behave in a uniform manner. More division of the aspectual field may be a viable option on the basis of irrefutable differences between the -en form been and the -ing form being in their distribution in relation to adverbs and the possibility of ellipsis.