TJ,
    No need to apologize. Here are roughly the explanations I use with my
students.
   The lexical verb is what you look up in the dictionary to see what it
means. It always comes last. ("Has been manipulating" includes the
lexical verb "manipulate".) Lexical verbs also carry transitivity
(transitive, intransitive, and so on) and govern the kinds of
complements that will show up in the predicate (direct object, indirect
object and so on.)
   The finite verb is what moves to the front of the clause when we want
to ask a question.  "Has Paul been manipulating us?"  Finite verb plus
lexical verb create the "mood element," which is what determines
whether we are predicating a statement, asking a question, and so
forth. Simple present and simple past can carry finite, but they lose
that (it splits out) in question form. "She leaves soon. Does she leave
soon?" In question form,"leaves" becomes "leave" because it is the
finite that carries the burden of subject/verb agreement. (The modals
are invariant.) The finite is very much what Langacher calls a
"grounding element." It's a huge key to grounding a statement within
discourse, whether we assert that something happens, has happened, may
happen, should happen, is being imagined as happening, and so on. A
non-finite clause is not grounded in that way and is therefore not
something we can agree or disagree with.
    Grammaticalization is something that the functional and cognitive
linguists talk about quite a bit because they see grammar (rightly, I
think) as emergent, as both sustained by use and arising out of use.
The modals, as Herb has pointed out, have become part of the syntax
but were once just regular verbs. A phrase like "am going to" has
grammaticalized as a predictor ("I will leave" and "I am going to
leave" are now similar) fairly recently.
   If you think of grammar as a fixed set of rules (possibly innate), then
grammaticalization may come as a surprise. Frequency creates a
stability, but a dynamic one.
   I'm flying to Pittsburgh this afternoon and so will see my email
sporadically through the weekend. I look forward to the continuation of
this thread.

Craig



> grammar
> in universities somehow didn't prepare me very well.  Phrases such
> as "lexical verbs" and "grammaticalized" and (your use of) "finite"
> don't work for me.  Out of curiosity, how would R/K diagramming
> handle what I'm thinking of as perfect tenses?
>
> tj
>
>
>
>
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