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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.
Verbs that can be used in an intransitive or transitive way are called ambitransitive verbs. In English, an example is the verb to eat; the sentences You eat (with an intransitive form) and You eat apples (a transitive form that has apples as the object) are both grammatical. The concept of valency is related to transitivity. The valency of a ...
Modern grammars do not differ substantially over membership in the list of auxiliary verbs, though they have refined the concept and, following an idea first put forward by John Ross in 1969, [8] have tended to take the auxiliary verb not as subordinate to a "main verb" (a concept that pedagogical grammars perpetuate), but instead as the head of a verb phrase.
Eat and read and many other verbs can be used either transitively or intransitively. Often there is a semantic difference between the intransitive and transitive forms of a verb: the water is boiling versus I boiled the water ; the grapes grew versus I grew the grapes .
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]
Apart from the modal verbs, which are irregular in that they do not take an -s in the third person (see above), the only verbs with irregular present tense forms are be, do, have, say and an archaic verb wit (and prefixed forms of these, such as undo and gainsay, which conjugate in the same way as the basic forms).
Do-support (sometimes referred to as do-insertion or periphrastic do), in English grammar, is the use of the auxiliary verb do (or one of its inflected forms e.g. does), to form negated clauses and constructions which require subject–auxiliary inversion, such as questions.
Negation uses do-support (i.e. do not or don't). For example: Now eat your dinner. You go and stand over there! Don't ever say that word again. Sentences of this type are used to give an instruction or order. When they are used to make requests, the word please (or other linguistic device) is often added for politeness: Please pass the salt.