A Psychological Perspective of the Spanish Subjunctive.

The arguments presented in this article are strictly semantic in nature. I have attempted to show that the meanings of existence in the case of ser and presence at locus in the case of estar, which I proposed as the basic distinction between the two copulative verbs of Spanish, are also operative in their roles as so-called auxiliaries. These arguments tend to support John R. Ross's claim-based on structural arguments and on evidence mainly from English-that the "auxiliary" as a grammatical category should be striken from the grammars of both English and Spanish and, possibly, from the inventory of universal grammar.'1 NOTES