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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 ...
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]
A verb (from Latin verbum 'word') is word that generally conveys an action (bring, read, walk, run, learn), an occurrence (happen, become), or a state of being (be, exist, stand). In the usual description of English , the basic form, with or without the particle to , is the infinitive .
Subject–auxiliary inversion (SAI; also called subject–operator inversion) is a frequently occurring type of inversion in the English language whereby a finite auxiliary verb – taken here to include finite forms of the copula be – appears to "invert" (change places) with the subject. [1]
A thesaurus or synonym dictionary lists similar or related words; these are often, but not always, synonyms. [15] The word poecilonym is a rare synonym of the word synonym. It is not entered in most major dictionaries and is a curiosity or piece of trivia for being an autological word because of its meta quality as a synonym of synonym.
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.
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.
A thesaurus (pl.: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar meanings to other words), [1] [2] sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms, sometimes simply as lists of synonyms and antonyms.