Auxiliary selection in Italian and French. A comparative study of the so-called peripheral verbs.

This thesis investigates the intricate phenomenon of auxiliary selection in two Romance languages, namely Italian and French. The primary objective is to elucidate the factors that influence the choice between the auxiliaries ‘be’ and ‘have’ in the formation of the perfect tense. The study focuses on verbs that can select both auxiliaries, commonly known as peripheral verbs (Sorace 2000), which, despite extensive individual examination, have not been comprehensively analyzed (Giancarli 2015). The central research questions addressed are: What characteristics enable these verbs to select both auxiliaries? Which factors determine the predominance of one auxiliary over the other? What is the relative weight of factors such as agentivity and telicity in auxiliary selection (Sorace 2000)? For the first time, this research systematically explores auxiliary selection in Italian and French using corpus analysis and natural language processing (NLP). By integrating these methods, the study aims to identify the most significant factors influencing auxiliary choice in intransitive verbs with auxiliary alternation. The research combines qualitative analysis of manually annotated occurrences from SketchEngine (Kilgarriff et al. 2014) with quantitative analysis using statistical models to determine the most significant parameters in auxiliary selection. The findings reveal the paramount importance of semantic, syntactic, and morphological aspects in the choice of ‘be’ or ‘have’. Notably, telicity is found to be less relevant for these verbs. The study also highlights significant differences between Italian and French. Italian verbs are categorized into full verbs and semi-auxiliaries. For full verbs, internal cause and human traits are crucial factors in auxiliary selection. For semi-auxiliary verbs, the type of infinitive and the human trait associated with particular infinitives are shown to be significant. In French, the type of construction heavily influences auxiliary choice. By providing comprehensive answers to previously unexplored areas, this study aligns with and extends the existing literature. It significantly enhances our understanding of verb categorization and auxiliary selection, with substantial implications for both theoretical and applied linguistics. Furthermore, it underscores the importance of integrative methodological approaches for analyzing complex linguistic phenomena.