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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, ...
Here the verb phrase (understood from the context) is reduced to a single auxiliary or other "special" verb, negated if appropriate. If there is no special verb in the original verb phrase, it is replaced by do/does/did: he does, they didn't. Clauses that omit the verb, in particular those like me too, nor me, me neither. The latter forms are ...
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.
For compound verbs or verbal construction using auxiliaries the negation can occur either to the left of the first verb, in-between the verbs or to the right of the second verb (the default position being to the left of the main verb when used with auxiliary and in-between the primary and the secondary verb when forming a compound verb).
While light verbs are similar to auxiliary verbs regarding their contribution of meaning to the clauses in which they appear, light verbs fail the diagnostics that identify auxiliary verbs and are therefore distinct from auxiliaries. The intuition between the term "light verb" is that the predicate is not at its full semantic potential.
The verb be has a larger number of different forms (am, is, are, was, were, etc.), while the modal verbs have a more limited number of forms. Some forms of be and of certain other auxiliary verbs also have contracted forms (' s, 're, 've, etc.). For full details of how these inflected forms of verbs are produced, see English verbs.