A widespread consensus in much research into the properties of the (verbal) syntactic spine holds that the spine is a hierarchy of functional projections; essentially satellites of lexical heads. In this perspective, functional elements inherit most of their properties from the lexical category of which they form the “functional entourage” (Chomsky 2001),  Panagiotidis (2023).  The role of auxiliaries (and other TMA (i.e. tense-modality-aspect) markings), it is believed, is to instantiate the different functional heads, thus to provide the clause with global grammatical content, e.g. TMA. In this paper I will argue that each auxiliary in fact has its own local TMA-package, necessarily accessible to the next auxiliary up the chain of verbs and auxiliaries. The proposal implies that auxiliaries contribute TMA-properties to the clause, not in an once-and-for-all global fashion, but in a compositional manner, depending on the number and nature of the specific auxiliaries involved for each particular clause.

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