Auxiliary verbs assist the main verb in expressing grammatical information in various languages.
Different languages have varying distributions and functions of auxiliary verbs, highlighting linguistic diversity.
Deep dives
Auxiliary Verbs in Different Languages
Auxiliary verbs are common across many languages and serve various functions. In English, they help express tense, mood, and aspect in sentences. Other languages, like Irish, Palestinian Arabic, and Kanande, also use auxiliary verbs in similar ways. However, not all languages use auxiliaries. Some languages use affixes or particles to convey similar meanings. For example, Bask, Palestinian Arabic, and Kanande employ B as a copula. These variations highlight the flexibility and diversity in the use of auxiliary verbs across different languages.
Different Functions of Auxiliary Verbs
Auxiliary verbs serve different functions depending on the language. The most common use is to express tense, mood, and aspect, such as in English examples like 'is eating', 'has eaten', 'does eat'. Approximately 30% of languages in the Grand Bank database employ auxiliaries for these purposes. Another common function of auxiliaries is negation, found in about 20% of languages. Languages like Irish use specific prefixes for negation. Approximately 10% of languages use auxiliaries for forming passive constructions. This distribution differs across language families and regions, illustrating the linguistic diversity in auxiliary usage.
Examples of Auxiliary Verbs in English
In English, auxiliary verbs like 'is', 'has', and 'does' assist in constructing various grammatical structures. They can indicate tense, as in 'the horse is eating grass', or ownership, as in 'the horse has an apple'. Auxiliary verbs are also used to form questions, such as 'does the horse eat grass?'. English uses modals as auxiliaries too, like 'can', 'will', and 'should'. Additionally, English demonstrates the flexibility of auxiliaries, as certain forms may vary in pronunciation like 'have' and 'have to'. Overall, auxiliary verbs play a crucial role in the grammatical structure of English sentences.
Auxiliary Verbs in Other Languages
Auxiliary verbs are not exclusive to English but are found in many other languages too. For example, B is a common copula and auxiliary in languages like Bask, Palestinian Arabic, and Kanande. These languages use B to express different functions, including recent past, habitual actions, and more. Other languages use unique strategies like affixes or particles to convey similar grammatical meanings, emphasizing the richness and diversity of auxiliary verb usage across various languages.
In the sentence “the horse has eaten an apple”, what is the word “has” doing? It’s not expressing ownership of something, like in “the horse has an apple”. (After all, the horse could have very sneakily eaten the apple.) Rather, it’s helping out the main verb, eat. Many languages use some of their verbs to help other verbs express grammatical information, and the technical name for these helping verbs is auxiliary verbs.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about auxiliaries! We talk about what we can learn about auxiliaries across 2000+ languages using a new linguistic mapping website called GramBank, why auxiliaries get pronounced subtly differently from the words they’re derived from, and how “be” and “have” are the major players of the auxiliary world (but there are other options too, like “do”, “let”, and “go”). We also put a whole bunch of farm animals in our example sentences this episode just so we have an excuse to make a very good wordplay at the end of the episode.
Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/720244703378964480/transcript-episode-81-the-verbs-had-been-being
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For links to things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/720244621612138496/lingthusiasm-81-the-verbs-had-been-being-helped
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