Timeline for Do auxiliary verbs always express different aspect/mood/tense?
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| Sep 20, 2016 at 13:24 | comment | added | jlawler | Right. And strict categorization has little use for describing naturally evolved phenomena. Which is why Greg's answer is right, for any grammatical use of "auxiliary verb"; grammatical terms are determined by form and not meaning. If you call be an auxiliary when used for the Progressive or Passive construction (a neutral term), then you should call it an auxiliary when used for the Predicate Adjective or Predicate Noun construction. The forms are identical and so are the usages; if you don't call it an auxiliary because it's the only tense-carrying verb, you're assuming the consequent. | |
| Sep 16, 2016 at 12:58 | comment | added | Wouter Lievens | I understand that. I'm not an academically trained linguist, just a software engineer with a passing interest in grammar. Naturally evolved concepts just don't lend themselves well to strict categorization. | |
| Sep 16, 2016 at 10:13 | comment | added | Greg Lee | You are not alone in admitting as auxiliaries only those verbs which accompany a main verb. Indeed, that view is built into the very term "auxiliary". The trouble with that is there is no evidence that it's true about English. Beginning with Chomsky's Syntactic Structures, linguists have made auxiliary status independent of whether there is a main non-auxiliary verb present. Our analysis of a language ought to be based on facts about that language, not facts about traditional terminology. | |
| Sep 16, 2016 at 8:50 | comment | added | Wouter Lievens | It seems my definition of auxiliary verb is off. I was strictly referring to cases where the auxiliary verb exists in addition to the main verb (as in "I will sleep"). | |
| Sep 16, 2016 at 5:50 | history | answered | Greg Lee | CC BY-SA 3.0 |