This chapter aims to address four key issues in the study of the English auxiliary system. The issues involve the properties that distinguish auxiliary verbs from main verbs, ordering restrictions among auxiliary verbs, combinatorial restrictions on the syntactic complements of auxiliary verbs, and auxiliary-sensitive phenomena like negation. The chapter first focuses on the morphosyntactic properties of English auxiliary verbs. We show that their distributional, ordering, and combinatorial properties all follow from their lexical groupings: modals, have/be, do, and to. The second part of this chapter concerns the so-called NICE phenomena, each of which is sensitive to the presence of an auxiliary verb and has been extensively analyzed in generative grammar. The chapter shows us that a construction-based analysis can offer a straightforward analysis of these phenomena, without reliance on movement operations or functional projections.

This chapter explores the nature of syntactic competence -- what it means to ‘know’ a language. It asks how generative grammar has been used to model competence. After discussing the difference between prescriptive and descriptive rules, we describe procedures for discovering descriptively adequate rules. We distinguish inductive from deductive grammars, the latter of which are associated with classical transformational models of grammar, according to which human languages have all and only those (structural) properties that are expressible in the transformational formalism and the former of which are associated with constraint-based views of grammar, according to which an expression is syntactically well-formed if its form is paired with its meaning as an instance of some grammatical construction. It is this construction-based view of grammar that we adopt in this book. Construction Grammar offers an enriched model of grammatical competence, which attempts to capture all of the linguistic routines that an adult native speaker knows. In Construction Grammar, grammar represents an array of form-meaning-function groupings of varying degrees of productivity and internal complexity.

This chapter offers a detailed description of the formal properties of English passive constructions. Passive sentences are systematically related to active sentences. After reviewing core properties of the passive constructions in English, we discuss the major features of prior transformational analyses and the empirical problems that prevent them from capturing regularities, as well as peculiarities, of English passive constructions. To avoid analytical problems arising from transformational analyses, this chapter suggests a construction-based analysis of be-passives that leverages multiple grammatical properties, including those related to grammatical categories, grammatical functions, and semantic/pragmatic constraints. This analysis has been extended to the prepositional passive as well as get-passive constructions, both of which behave differently from the be-passive constructions. We see that the construction-based framework offers a way to account for relations of ‘family resemblance’ that unite seemingly divergent constructions.

The chapter begins with a discussion of what word learning entails within a MDM framework. It then moves onto discussing psycholinguistic models of vocabulary acquisition, in particular Kroll and Stewart (1994), Pavlenko (2009), and Schonebaert et al. (2009). It is argued that the 1LEx MDM framework can provide insight into some of the empirical puzzles that motivate these models.

In Distributed Morphology, PF is the sequence of steps that a derivational chunk takes on its way to the externalization systems. This chapter argues that these steps are also integarated in the bilingual’s mind. The empirical evidence comes from clitic combinations in Catalan/Spanish and consonant mutation in English/Welsh. It is subsequently argued that even word order and prosodification are integrated. A section of the chapter is devoted to MacSwan and Colina’s (2014) ‘PF Interface Condition,’ which makes the prediction that one cannot code-switch within the word. I argue that code-switching does not obey this restriction andthe phonological effects that lead to this conclusion follow from phase theory.

This chapter presents an extended discussion of gender assignment and gender concord in four code-switching varieties: Basque/Spanish, English/Spanish, Nahuatl/Spanish, and German/Spanish. The detailed discussion of these data provides extensive support for the 1Lex MDM model.

This chapter explores recent work on code-switching and code-blending that work within theoretical paradigms similar to mine. Some of this work is couched within distributed morphology, while some other work uses soft constraints in the Optimality Theory tradition. The discussion provides additional context to the proposals in this monograph while emphasizing its novelty.

This chapter introduces the separationist approach to bilingualism and shows that its foundations are shaky. More generally, Creole continua argue that thinking of languages as discrete entities is a mistake. Code-switching involves integrating different types of linguistic material and establishing dependencies among them. The chapter also discusses methodological issues and argues that acceptability judgments of deep bilinguals are a good method to obtain data.

Presents a summary of the results in the previous nine chapters, which constitute as many empirical arguments in favor of the 1Lex MDM. There are a few remarks on translanguaging.