English auxiliary verbs
English auxiliary verbs are a small set of English verbs, which include the English modal auxiliary verbs and a few others. Although the auxiliary verbs of English are widely believed to lack inherent semantic meaning and instead to modify the meaning of the verbs they accompany, they are nowadays classed by linguists as auxiliary on the basis not of semantic but of grammatical properties: among these, that they invert with their subjects in interrogative main clauses and are negated either by the simple addition of not or by negative inflection.
History of the concept
When describing English, the adjective auxiliary was "formerly applied to any formative or subordinate elements of language, e.g. prefixes, prepositions." As applied to verbs, its conception was originally rather vague and varied significantly.Some historical examples
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, that being a mere sign of the future tense.
In volume 5 of Tristram Shandy, the narrator's father explains that "The verbs auxiliary we are concerned in here, . . . , are, am; was; have; had; do; did; make; made; suffer; shall; should; will; would; can; could; owe; ought; used; or is wont."
Charles Wiseman's Complete English Grammar of 1764 notes that most verbs
cannot be conjugated through all their Moods and Tenses, without one of the following principal Verbs have and be. The first serves to conjugate the rest, by supplying the compound tenses of all Verbs both Regular and Irregular, whether Active, Passive, Neuter, or Impersonal, as may be seen in its own variation, &c.
Along with have and be, it goes on to include do, may, can, shall, will as auxiliary verbs.
W. C. Fowler's The English Language of 1857 says:
, or Helping Verbs, perform the same office in the conjugation of principal verbs which inflection does in the classical languages, though even in those languages the substantive verb is sometimes used as a helping verb. . . . I. The verbs that are always auxiliary to others are, May, can, shall, must; II. Those that are sometimes auxiliary and sometimes principal verbs are, Will, have, do, be, and let.
The verbs that all the sources cited above agree are auxiliary verbs are the modal auxiliary verbs may, can, and shall; most also include be, do, and have.
Auxiliary verbs as heads
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, have tended to take the auxiliary verb not as subordinate to a "main verb", but instead as the head of a verb phrase. Examples include The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and Bas Aarts' Oxford Modern English Grammar. This is shown in the tree diagram below for the clause I can swim.The clause has a subject noun phrase I and a head verb phrase, headed by the auxiliary verb can. The VP also has a complement clause, which has a head VP, with the head verb swim.
Recent definitions
A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language says of "verbs in auxiliary function" that "In contrast to full verbs, are capable of functioning as auxiliary or 'helping' verbs ", which seems to refer back to a table showing the "main verb" following one to four auxiliary verbs. It is not obvious how this definition would exclude lexical verbs such as try – although they would certainly fail the book's own list of criteria for auxiliary verbs, as listed later.In his book English Auxiliaries: History and Structure, Anthony R. Warner writes that the English auxiliary verbs "are rather sharply defined as a group by distinctive formal properties."
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language describes auxiliary verbs as "a small list of verbs with very specific syntactic properties", differing from "all the rest of the verbs in the dictionary, which we will call the lexical verbs. . . in inflectional morphology as well as syntax" And later: "A general definition of auxiliary verb is that it denotes a closed class of verbs that are characteristically used as markers of tense, aspect, mood, and voice." It too adds a list of criteria.
Auxiliary verbs distinguished grammatically
The list of auxiliary verbs in Modern English, along with their inflected forms, is shown in the following table.Contractions are only shown if their orthography is distinctive. There are also numerous unstressed versions that are typically, although not necessarily, written in the standard way. For these, see [|a later section]. Where there is a blank, the auxiliary verb lacks this form.
A major difference between the results, shown above, of defining auxiliary verbs syntactically and doing so based on a notion of "helping" is that the syntactic definition includes:
- be even when used simply as a copular verb
- idioms using would that take a finite clause complement
- have with no other verb : uses where it cannot be said to "help" any other verb.
Archaic forms of ''be'', ''do'', and ''have''
The NICE criteria
One set of criteria for distinguishing between auxiliary and lexical verbs is F. R. Palmer's "NICE": "Basically the criteria are that the auxiliary verbs occur with negation, inversion, 'code', and emphatic affirmation while the verbs do not."| Auxiliary verb | Lexical verb | |
| Negation | I will not eat apples. I won't eat apples. | *I eat not apples.
|
| Inversion | Has Lee eaten apples? | *Eats Lee apples? |
| Code | Can it devour 3 kg of meat? Yes it can'. | Does it devour 3 kg of meat?
|
| Emphatic affirmation | You say we're not ready?We ' ready. | You say we didn't practise enough?
|
NICE: Negation
negation most commonly employs an auxiliary verb, for example, We can't believe it'll rain today or I don't need an umbrella. As late as Middle English, lexical verbs could also participate in clausal negation, so a clause like Lee eats not apples would have been grammatical, but this is no longer possible in Modern English, where lexical verbs require "dosupport".Palmer writes that the "Negation" criterion is "whether occurs with the negative particle not, or more strictly, whether it has a negative form", the latter referring to negatively inflected won't, hasn't, haven't, etc.
NICE: Inversion
Although English is a subject–verb–object language, an interrogative main clause is the most important among several constructions that put a verb before the subject. This is called subject–auxiliary inversion because only auxiliary verbs participate in such constructions: Can/should/must Lee eat apples?; Never have I enjoyed a quince. Again, in Middle English, lexical verbs were no different; but in Modern English *Eats Lee apples? and *Never enjoy I a quince are ungrammatical, and dosupport is again required: Does Lee eat apples?; Never do I enjoy quinces.NICE: Code
attributes this term to J. R. Firth, writing:There are sentences in English in which a full verb is later 'picked up' by an auxiliary. The position is very similar to that of a noun being 'picked up' by a pronoun. If the initial sentence, which contains the main verb, is not heard, all the remainder is unintelligible; it is, in fact, truly in code. The following example is from Firth:
Attempting to remove the complement of a lexical verb normally has an ungrammatical result or an inappropriate one. However, if a number of conditions are met, the result may be acceptable.NICE: Emphatic affirmation
writes that "a characteristic of the auxiliaries is their use in emphatic affirmation with nuclear stress upon the auxiliary", as in You must see him. He concedes that "any verbal form may have nuclear stress"; thus We saw them; however, auxiliaries stressed in this way are used for "the denial of the negative", whereas lexical verbs again use dosupport.NICE is widely cited : as examples, by A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, and the Oxford Modern English Grammar.
- You say you heard them? / No, we them.
- You can't have seen them. / We see them.