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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 ...
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.
The verbs do, say and have additionally have irregular third person singular present tense forms (see below). The copular verb be is highly irregular, with the forms be, am, is, are, was, were, been and being. On the other hand, modal verbs (such as can and must) are defective verbs, being used only in a limited number of forms.
An imperative, in contrast, generally applies to the listener. When a language is said to have a jussive, the jussive forms are different from the imperative ones, but may be the same as the forms called "subjunctive" in that language. Latin and Hindi are examples of where the jussive is simply about certain specific uses of the subjunctive.
Regular verbs have identical past tense and past participle forms in -ed, but there are 100 or so irregular English verbs with different forms (see list). The verbs have, do and say also have irregular third-person present tense forms (has, does /dʌz/, says /sɛz/).
A typical English verb may have five different inflected forms: The base form or plain form (go, write, climb), which has several uses—as an infinitive, imperative, present subjunctive, and present indicative except in the third-person singular; The -s form (goes, writes, climbs), used as the present indicative in the third-person singular
Classified by the number of their valency arguments, usually four basic types are distinguished: intransitives, transitives, ditransitives and double transitive verbs. Some verbs have special grammatical uses and hence complements, such as copular verbs (i.e., be); the verb do used for do-support in questioning and negation; and tense or aspect ...
As in English, modality can be indicated either lexically, with main verbs such as yào "want" followed by another main verb, or with auxiliary 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 ...