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The a-sentences contain auxiliary verbs that do not select the subject argument. What this means is that the embedded verbs go, do, and lie and cheat are responsible for semantically selecting the subject argument. The point is that while control verbs may have the same outward appearance as auxiliary verbs, the two verb types are quite different.
Modern grammars do not differ substantially over membership in the list of auxiliary verbs, though they have refined the concept and, following an idea first put forward by John Ross in 1969, [8] have tended to take the auxiliary verb not as subordinate to a "main verb" (a concept that pedagogical grammars perpetuate), but instead as the head of a verb phrase.
The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality, properties such as possibility and obligation. [a] They can most easily be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participles or plain forms [b]) and by their lack of the ending ‑(e)s for the third-person singular.
In Modern English, this type of modality is expressed via a periphrastic construction, with the form would + infinitive, (for example, I would buy), and thus is a mood only in the broad sense and not in the more common narrow sense of the term "mood" requiring morphological changes in the verb. In other languages, verbs have a specific ...
The concept of c-selection overlaps to an extent with subcategorization. Predicates c-select the syntactic category of their complement arguments - e.g. noun (phrase), verb (phrase), adjective (phrase), etc. - i.e. they determine the syntactic category of their complements. In contrast, predicates s-select the semantic content of their arguments.
For example, the English verbs arrive and run differ in their lexical aspect since the former describes an event which has a natural endpoint while the latter does not. Lexical aspect differs from grammatical aspect in that it is an inherent semantic property of a predicate, while grammatical aspect is a syntactic or morphological property.
Verbs that are usually monovalent, like sleep, cannot take a direct object. However, there are cases where the valency of such verbs can be expanded, for instance in He sleeps the sleep of death. This is called valency expansion. Verb valence can also be described in terms of syntactic versus semantic criteria.
Historically, English used to have a similar verbal paradigm. Some historic verb forms are used by Shakespeare as slightly archaic or more formal variants (I do, thou dost, he doth) of the modern forms. Some languages with verbal agreement can leave certain subjects implicit when the subject is fully determined by the verb form.