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An auxiliary verb (abbreviated aux) is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it occurs, so as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany an infinitive verb or a participle, which respectively provide the main semantic content of the clause. [1]
The first English grammar, Bref Grammar for English by William Bullokar, published in 1586, does not use the term "auxiliary" but says: All other verbs are called verbs-neuters-un-perfect because they require the infinitive mood of another verb to express their signification of meaning perfectly: and be these, may, can, might or mought, could, would, should, must, ought, and sometimes, will ...
This is a list of English auxiliary verbs, i.e. helping verbs, which include Modal verbs and Semi-modal verbs. See also auxiliary verbs, light verbs, ...
In Mandarin the auxiliary verbs have six properties that distinguish them from main verbs: [8]: pp.173–174 They must co-occur with a verb (or an understood verb). They cannot be accompanied by aspect markers. They cannot be modified by intensifiers such as "very". They cannot be nominalized (used in phrases meaning, for example, "one who can ...
In the various cases seen above that require do-support, the auxiliary verb do makes no apparent contribution to the meaning of the sentence [6] so it is sometimes called a dummy auxiliary. [2] Historically, however, in Middle English , auxiliary do apparently had a meaning contribution, serving as a marker of aspect (probably perfective aspect ...
For example, in Serbo-Croatian, the Old Church Slavonic verb xъtěti ("to want/to wish") has gone from a content word (hoće hoditi "s/he wants to walk") to an auxiliary verb in phonetically reduced form (on/ona će hoditi "s/he will walk") to a clitic (hoditi će), and finally to a fused inflection (hodiće "s/he will walk").
The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality, properties such as possibility and obligation. [a] They can most easily be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participles or plain forms [b]) and by their lack of the ending ‑(e)s for the third-person singular.
Here, the auxiliary verb 會 (huì, "can") appears to license the omission of the verb phrase 唱歌 (chànggē, "sing"). However, Cai et al. (2013) argue that this example does not rely on syntactic ellipsis in the same manner as English. [21] Instead, Mandarin VP ellipsis is interpreted pragmatically, relying on context and semantic cues.