Is the Polish Verb iść an Auxiliary to be?

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the degree of grammaticalization displayed by the Polish verb iść ‘to go’ in its infinitive constructions. A significant number of such VP show features usually associated with ongoing auxiliarization (ambiguity in context, desemanticization, released selection constraints and loss of grammatical properties of the verb). However, semantic bleaching is far from being complete as long as antonyms of iść are banned from infinitive complement position. Considering available corpus data, we assume that the grammaticalization of iść in its infinitive constructions has presently attained the stage of bridging contexts (Heine 2002). Keywords: grammaticalization; auxiliarization; Polish motion verbs; semantic change