Auxilary Verbs
Auxiliary verbs, also known as helping verbs, are used in combination with main verbs to form different tenses, voices, and moods in a sentence. They help convey the time, aspect, and modality of the action being described. Common auxiliary verbs include "be," "have," and "do," and they play a crucial role in constructing grammatically correct and meaningful sentences.
8 Key excerpts on "Auxilary Verbs"
eBook - ePubLinguistics for Clinicians
A Practical Introduction
- Maria Black, Shula Chiat(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...These are traditionally identified by their syntactic status, but they are also distinguished by their phonological and semantic characteristics. Phonologically, the elements of the auxiliary system consist of unstressed words, or inflections which are segments or syllables of words. Modal and aspectual verbs are words such as can, has, were, but notice what form these usually take: She /kən/ go by bus He /həz/ escaped They /wə/ yawning. Once they occur in a sentence, they typically reduce their vowel, usually to schwa. Some of these verbs reduce even further, taking the form of a phonological segment that attaches to the preceding syllable: /∫ıl/ arrive late (she will → she’ll) /hiz/ escaped (he has → he’s) /aım/ yawning (I am → I’m). Tense and the present and past participles usually take the form of a segmental or syllabic inflection: walks – /s/ walked – /t/ washes – /ıZ/ waited – /ıd/ given – /ən/ giving – /ıŋ/. It will be important to take these phonological characteristics into account in any clinical activity assessing or targeting auxiliaries. For a more extensive analysis of these characteristics, see Links to other levels in Chapters 12 and 13, and Section 14.5 of Chapter 14. Semantically, the elements of the auxiliary system enable us to anchor situations in time. They indicate whether the situation is past, present or future. But as we shall see in the next two chapters, that is not all they do. They also convey something about the time span of a situation. And they enable us to go beyond actually-occurring situations, and present situations as potentially occurring. The timing and reality of situations are important notions that language is uniquely able to express. Where auxiliaries are a problem for a person, we may need to consider how these aspects of meaning can be brought out. Exercises Sarah, aged 3:2, is developing language rapidly...
eBook - ePub- Marie-Therese Weston(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Teach Yourself(Publisher)
...French has only the simple form, je travaille, tu travailles, and so on. b Auxiliary verbs A verb used to support the main verb, for example, I am working, you are working …, is called an auxiliary verb. Working gives us the information as to what activity is going on; am/are tell us that it is continuous. The most important auxiliary verbs in English are to be, to have and to do. You use do, for example, to ask questions and to negate statements: Do you work on Saturdays? Yes, but I do not work on Sundays. French does not use faire (to do) as an auxiliary for asking questions or for negating statements, except in certain dialects, but être (to be) and avoir (to have) are used to form compound tenses, as we shall see below. Insight – ‘avoir’ and ‘être’ Avez-vous faim et soif? The verb avoir is often used where English uses the verb to be. This example, Are you hungry and thirsty?, literally translates as Do you have hunger and thirst? Where the English use to be plus an adjective, the French often use to have plus a noun – but not always! Here is an example of a mixture of the two: Ils avaient très froid, en fait ils étaient littéralement gelés. They were really cold, in fact they were literally freezing. Other examples include: J’ai quarante ans – I am forty ; Tu as de la chance! – You’re. lucky! ; Elle a raison – She’s right ; Nous avons sommeil – We’re tired, and many more! c Simple and compound tenses Tenses formed by adding endings to the verb stem are called simple tenses, for example, in the sentence: I worked in a factory last summer. The ending -ed has been added to the stem, work, to form the imperfect tense. English and French also have compound tenses where an auxiliary verb is used as well as the main verb, for example: I have worked in a factory every summer for five years. The auxiliary verb to have has been introduced to form what is usually known as the perfect tense...
eBook - ePub- Edward Dr. Woods, Rudy Coppieters(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...UNIT FIVE Time, tense and aspect 5.1. Auxiliary verbs Sections 477–478; 582; 735 Auxiliary verbs, or auxiliaries, are verbs which help to make up a verb phrase in combination with a main verb. The verbs do, have and be can be used as primary auxiliaries, while can, could, will, etc. are used as modal auxiliaries. Auxiliaries only occur by themselves if the main verb is supplied by the earlier context. They can be placed before not and also before the subject in questions. Contracted forms of auxiliaries are typical of spoken and informal English. Most auxiliaries also have contracted negative forms. Task one * Identify the auxiliary verbs in the following text, underlining the primary auxiliaries once and the modal auxiliaries twice. Ruth watched him as he dropped his bag down on the sofa, felt in his pocket and carefully laid fifteen brand new fifty-pound notes on the table. Ruth was impressed. ‘Great-grandmother’s legacy? Bank raid?’ Martin was biting his lip hard. ‘It’s all there. You can count it.’ Ruth fingered the money. The new logs that Mr Wellbeing had cut for her hissed and spat from the fire. ‘You’re serious.’ ‘I had more money in my account than I thought.’ Martin began to hum as he pulled at the zip of his anorak. It was an odd, uneasy sound and Ruth had never heard it before. For the first time since she had met him, Ruth sensed that he might not be telling the truth and she was intrigued. ‘You mean you cashed in your life savings for a one-legged chair?’ Ruth did laugh then. ‘I think Papa would have appreciated that.’ ‘Don’t mock.’ ‘I wasn’t mocking, Martin. Hemingway had a sense of humour. You must know that.’ ‘Not about himself. He didn’t like to be laughed at.’ (from Michael Palin, Hemingway’s Chair, pp...
eBook - ePubAmerican English Grammar
An Introduction
- Seth R. Katz(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 6 Verbs (V) Verbs are a category of content words that, in traditional grammar, are defined as words that name actions. There are also several subcategories of verb forms, the largest two being finite and non-finite verbs. In this chapter, we will deal primarily with finite verbs: verbs that can function as the head of a verb phrase (VP) that, in turn, functions as the predicate of a sentence or dependent clause (VP:P RED). We will discuss non-finite verbs at length in Chapter 12. Finite verbs have a number of features, including tense (present, past), modality (e.g. indicative, modal, imperative, subjunctive), aspect (progressive, perfect, imperfect), and voice (active, passive). Verbs also take different kinds of complements: words or phrases that complete the meaning of the verb (e.g. direct object, indirect object, subject complement). We will examine verb complements in Chapter 7. 6.1 Verb Forms In discussing finite verbs, we must talk about further sub-categories: lexical verbs, auxiliary verbs (A UX ; also called “helping verbs”), and semi-auxiliaries (semi-modal and imperfect aspectual verbs). Lexical verbs are any verb that can function alone (or with auxiliary and/or semi-auxiliary verbs) as the main verb (MV) in a clause. Lexical verbs are also inflected: they change form To mark tense (present, past; we will discuss tense below). In the present tense forms, to mark the person referred to (think back to the discussion of personal pronouns in 5.2). All verbs in English (except be) have one form for all persons and numbers except third-person singular, where all add - s. To mark the present participle by adding - ing (this is true for all verbs in English). To mark the past participle. Kick, sing, run, drive, and be are examples of familiar lexical verbs: all name “actions” (though be may not seem very “active”), and all add suffixes or change spelling for tense, person, and participle forms...
eBook - ePubThe Syntax and Morphology of English Verbs
Patterns that Matter
- Joseph Embley Emonds(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
...1 English modals and be are not irregular verbs 1.1 English auxiliaries The apparent complexity of the English system of verbal auxiliaries is well known and has been analyzed in many works on grammar, both theoretical and practical. To illustrate the variety of auxiliaries, let’s examine an artificially constructed but still simple exchange among four friends of a couple who are applying for jobs. (1-1) a Are John and Mary maybe getting hired now? b John is already hired. Was Mary not being hired Monday? So they did get hired. c That’s wrong; John and Mary have not yet been hired. d But they will be hired soon, even if being hired does not seem easy and is not quick. With the same main verb hired, these sentences contain twelve different words that are called auxiliaries: are, getting, is, was, did, get, have, been, will, be, being, and does. And all except get/getting and be/being appear to be unrelated in form to each other. 1 Traditional and structuralist treatments of the English verb go some way toward setting up an observationally adequate system, for example the “5 slot model” in (1-2) laid out in Quirk et al. (2004). (1-2) English predicates: (modal)-(perfect have)-(progressive be)-(passive be) – lexical verb Nonetheless, these treatments end up stating that an English lexical verb such as hired in the examples above can be preceded by a string of up to four auxiliary verbs in the same clause (should have been getting hired), and that these verbs, being subject to item-particular restrictions, are, well, just irregular. Thus, the available descriptions are simply lists of unpredictable irregularities of form and combination, and make no clear line between which verbs are “lexical” and which are “auxiliary”. The first decades of generative grammar saw significant progress in making formal sense of the English verb system. One important ingredient of this progress was the claim from the start (Chomsky 1957: ch...
eBook - ePubAnalysing Sentences
An Introduction to English Syntax
- Noel Burton-Roberts(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...6 More on verbs Auxiliary VPs DOI: 10.4324/9781003118916-7 This chapter comes in two parts. Part I: Lexical and auxiliary verbs. Here I first explain the forms and the ordering of lexical and auxiliary verbs. Then I explain how auxiliary verbs figure in the structure of VP. Part II: Constructions that depend on auxiliary verbs. Here I explain three constructions that crucially involve auxiliary verbs: passive sentences, negative sentences and questions. Part I: Lexical and auxiliary verbs Every full (non-elliptical) VP includes a lexical verb (as head) and it may contain one or more auxiliary verbs. So far, we’ve only looked at sentences with a lexical verb. I listed the auxiliaries in Chapter 4. Here’s the list again: be, have and do (these three can also be lexical, though with different senses) and can/could, will/would, shall/should, may/might, must and need. Notice we can actually list them. This is because, unlike lexical verbs, there’s a fixed number of them; they constitute a ‘closed’ category. In contrast to the (open) LEXICAL category of verbs, the auxiliaries constitute a FUNCTIONAL category. Be, have and do are sometimes called primary auxiliaries. This contrasts them with all the others, which are modal auxiliaries. I’ll use fill as my example of a regular lexical verb and write as my example of an irregular lexical verb. These are in italics in [2]–[5]. The auxiliaries are in bold. [1a] Daisy fills / filled the pool. [1b] Max writes / wrote nothing. [2a] Daisy will / would fill the pool. [2b] Max can/could write nothing. [3a] Daisy has/had filled the pool. [3b] Max has/had written nothing. [4a] Daisy is / was filling the pool. [4b] Max is/was writing nothing. [5a] The pool is/was filled. [5b] Nothing is/was written. These examples show that, in a sequence of verbs: (A) Auxiliaries (if present) always PRECEDE the lexical verb. (B) It’s always just the first verb – whether lexical or auxiliary – that displays the TENSE distinction between PRESENT and...
eBook - ePub- Fidèle Mpiranya(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...13 Auxiliary verbs and the expression of complex tenses In addition to the prefixed tense markers seen in Language note 6.1–3, some categories of verbs may be used in support of a main verb in order to put the occurrence of a given action or state in perspective. These types of verbs are generally referred to as auxiliaries. 13.1. Auxiliary “be” and the notions of “anteriority” or “simultaneity” The auxiliary verb kuwa “be” may be used before main verbs in various tenses to express the notion of “anteriority” or “simultaneity” between two actions or states, in the past or in the future. These types of constructions imply notions such as “by then”, “then/at that time”, or “in that time period”. In particular, the auxiliary kuwa “be” followed by a perfect tense verb (see marker -me-/-ja- or -me-sha-/-ja- … bado) expresses an action or a state that was completed in the past or will have been completed in the future, in reference to another action or state, as shown in (1–4). In the following examples (1–4), you will observe that the negation of these types of clauses is generally marked on the main verb. Placing the marker on the auxiliary verb emphasizes the negation, denying any affirmative presupposition, as shown by the double negation in the English glosses in (1d, 2e, 3c). In addition, the auxiliary kuwa “be” followed by a present tense verb with the marker -na-/-ki- expresses an action that was ongoing in the past/recent past or that will be ongoing in the future, in reference to another action or state, as shown in (5–7). In this context, the compound tense with -ki- may refer to a repetitive action that used to take place, has been taking place, or will be taking place in the future (8). In addition, the verb “be” in past or future tense may be associated with a main verb in subjunctive mood to express an action/state that was or will be expected to take place, as in (10–11). 13.2...
eBook - ePubThe International Auxiliary Language Esperanto
Grammar & Commentary
- George Cox(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Perlego(Publisher)
...Intransitive verbs have therefore no object and no passive voice. Auxiliary Verb (helpa verbo). 163. There is but one auxiliary verb in Esperanto, esti = to be. This verb is used to form the passive voice, and also all the compound tenses of the active voice. The verb havi = to have is in no sense an auxiliary, but is an ordinary active verb denoting ownership, and governing the accusative case, as: Mi havas libron = I have a book. In Esperanto the following and other verbs are often used where English would usually employ "to be," viz., kuŝi = to lie ; sidi = to be situate ; sin trovi = to find oneself ; troviĝi = to be found ; stari = to stand ; farti, or, stati = to be (well or ill). Examples. — La krajono kuŝas (estas) sur la tablo = The pencil is (lies) on the table. Sur la kameno staris (estis) fera kaldrono, en kiu sin trovis (estis) bolanta akvo; tra la fenestro, kiu sin trovis (estis) apud la pordo, la vaporo iris sur la korton = On the hearth was (stood) an iron kettle, in which was (found itself) boiling water; through the window, which was near the door, steam went out into (on to) the yard. Kiel statas via tuso? = How is your. cough? Impersonal Use of Verbs. 164. Verbs used impersonally (senpersone) express a fact or action without indicating any person as the subject or actor. In English they are used only in the third person singular, preceded by "it," but in Esperanto they are entirely impersonal. The following are cases of their impersonal use:— (a). Verbs which relate to the weather. Examples. — Pluvas = It rains. Pluvos = It will rain. Fulmis = It lightened. Neĝus = It would snow. Hajlis = It hailed. (b). Verbs which are generally used with the subject expressed, but occasionally without. Examples. — Okazas = It happens. Ŝajnos = It will seem. Prosperis al mi trovi = It was my fortune to find. (c)...
