Perífrasis verbales: Una mirada desde los universales lingüísticos

The main goal of this paper is to show that the different verbal periphrasis in Spanish keep a non fortuitous order, which can be derived from the one proposed by the universal hierarchy of categories (Foley and Van Valin 1984; Bybee 1985; Hengeveld 1989 and 2004, among others). Firstly, we draw a parallelism with the adverbs studied by Cinque (1999), which helps determine the different sentence domains of the periphrasis. The passive voice periphrasis, the aspectual ones referred to the phases and the event quantification, and the ones of deontic modality are placed in the innermost layer, corresponding to the VP. The inflectional layer hosts the temporo-aspectual periphrasis whereas the complementizer layer, which connects the propositional content with the illocutionary force, contains the periphrasis of epistemic modality. Once the subtypes are identified, we analyse their cyclic application possibilities, their interaction with negation and with cleft construcctions. Finally, we comment on the semantic, syntactic and morphologycal consequences of the different levels of the grammaticalization of some auxiliaries.