Esse and sta: auxiliary selection in the aquilan dialect

This paper presents data on auxiliary selection in Aquilan dialect. It focuses on the two auxiliary verbs esse and sta, which respectively express a permanent and temporary property that holds for a given predicate. The goals of the paper are twofold. A first goal is to offer data on the distribution of these auxiliary verbs, filling an empirical void in the literature. A second goal is to offer a formal syntactic and semantic treatment of these two auxiliaries. This treatment is shown to make several predictions on the properties of these auxiliaries, and their interaction with other parts of speech.