A syntactic account of auxiliary selection in French

Abstract This article presents a modern theoretical approach to auxiliary selection in Standard European French. Assuming that have and be are allomorphs spelling out the functional head v Aux , it argues that the person feature identity of v Aux plays a central role in determining auxiliary choice: be is inserted when T and v Aux share the same person feature identity, and when identity differs, have obtains. Crucially, and unlike most analyses in the literature, this simple proposal provides a unified account of auxiliary selection for unaccusatives, transitives, and reflexive verbs. It explains why reflexive transitives pattern with unaccusatives, and as a result, the analysis challenges the view that auxiliary selection is sensitive to argument structure. A key assumption here is that have functions as the elsewhere auxiliary.