Italian Verbs with Two Auxiliaries: A Forced-Choice Experiment

Abstract In this experiment, 62 university students, native speakers of Italian living in Northern Italy, were asked to choose between two nearly identical sentences featuring intransitive verbs which, according to the literature, can take either auxiliary (AUX) essere “be” or avere “have” in compound tenses. A binary logistic regression showed that for 40% of the time, participants preferred one AUX over the other. In general, the frequency of verbs and association scores between the AUX and the past participle in the input straightforwardly determined the remaining preferences, and especially the choice of essere. The impact of verb semantics on participants’ choices depended on the AUX. In the presence of telic completions and inanimate subjects, the likelihood of AUX essere to be chosen increased, whereas no effect of animacy and completion type was found for the AUX avere. Based on these data, one may conclude that (a) AUX essere is more permeable to both frequency effect and verb semantics than avere; and (b) among educated young adult native speakers living in Northern Italy, there is much less optionality in the choice of the AUX than it is assumed by some linguists.