The Subtractive Pattern of Auxiliaries

Auxiliaries are known to arise either (i) with a certain inflectional category (The Additive pattern), or (ii) in the combination of such categories (The Overflow pattern; Bjorkman 2011). This talk is about a little-discussed third pattern where verbal inflectional information is (optionally) lost: The Subtractive pattern. Based on a small survey of languages, I argue that the subtractive pattern reflects markedness-related dissimilation effects analogous to clitic reduction and deletion in Biscayan varieties of Basque (Arregi & Nevins 2012). The account is most naturally accommodated in theories where auxiliaries arise as a morphological well-formedness condition (cf. Cowper 2010, Bjorkman 2011) rather than due to c-selection (e.g. Pietraszko 2023).