Talk:Auxiliary verb

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Missing auxiliary verbs

"Keep" is a glaring absence from the table. "He kept walking, but she couldn't keep going." etc, etc. --71.222.173.131 (talk) 16:37, 3 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Keep is not an auxiliary verb. It does not license subject-auxiliary inversion (*Kept he drinking the water?) and it does not license VP-ellipsis (*She kept drinking the water, and he kept, as well).

According to the Merriam-Webster and the Collins, get can be an auxiliary verb. Shouldn’t it get included in the list? Palpalpalpal (talk) 08:48, 3 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

"Auxiliary Verb" and "Main Verb" are antiquated concepts

If a be verb is an auxiliary verb in the "She is the boss" example, what is the main verb? It's tempting to consider can as an auxiliary verb in the "I can swim" example, but in that case I'm hopeful that a linguistic guru can explain how can can simultaneously constitute a finite verb and an auxiliary verb. Some linguistic gurus assert that "do" can function as an auxiliary verb in a sentence such as, "I do want tea." Please!

There are finite verbs and there are infinitive verbs as well as participles:

"I do want tea." < do = finite verb; want = infinitive verb
"I can swim." < can = (modal) finite verb; swim = infinitive verb
"He has given his all." < has = finite verb; given = past participle
"The paper will have been scrutinized by Fred." < will = finite verb; have= infinitive verb; been = stative past participle; scrutinized = transitive past participle

Old school linguistic gurus STILL want to identify a "main verb" in a sentence such as, "Have the papers been scrutinized by Fred?" If "scrutinized" is purported to be the main verb, then an exemplar reply about Fred's papers, "Yes, they have," contains no main verb despite how have is a finite verb. Uh-oh.

The most intransigent old school linguistic gurus insist that sentences such as "Come help me" and "I dare not attempt it" contain auxiliary verbs. That's where the old school definition for modal verb is exposed. Both "come" and "dare" indeed are modal verbs in the examples above (i.e. they modify the operation of their respective infinitive verbs) despite how they are not the uninflected variety of modal verbs that typically are the only ones included in the defective class of modal verbs.

Let's ditch the auxiliary verb/main verb construct as a late 19th century relic and reconsider the modal verb construct. (FYI: I'm neither a phrase structure proponent nor a dependency grammar proponent; call me a functionalist who wants to help ESL learners avoid the pitfalls evident in old school grammar definitions.) Kent Dominic 01:38, 12 April 2019 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kent Dominic (talk • contribs)

I'm walking back the suggestion to ditch the abovementioned terms: "auxiliary verb" has a place in modern linguistic theory but only vis-a-vis its interaction with participles and infinitive verbs. Also, "main verb" might be a useful introduction to linguistics in primary school education. It also deserves encyclopedic mention concerning its historical use before the terms "participle" and "infinitive" took on linguistic primacy. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 07:13, 30 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

verbs that belong to both auxiliary and lexical classes: BE

According to the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, page 92, the auxiliary verbs of English are:

[modals]: can, may, will, shall, must, ought, need, dare
[non-modals]: be, have, do, %use

Need, dare, have, do, use are dually categorised: they belong to both auxiliary and lexical verb classes.

Why isn't the verb BE included with those that belong to both auxiliary and lexical classes? --Backinstadiums (talk) 10:54, 6 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Very long auxiliary verb chain

Is it worth including an extreme example of a long unbroken chain of auxiliaries? The current longest is "Fred may be being judged to have been deceived by the explanation," but this chain is broken into to bigger parts. A sentence like "The photo would have had to have been taken before 1910" has a longer string of unbroken auxiliaries. noktulo (talk) 05:04, 28 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

POV issue with catenas

The section on Auxiliary_verb#Multiple_auxiliaries writes about the "catena". This section was written by User:Tjo3ya. This user is the researcher who has proposed the "catena" concept. This lead to an issue of possible WP:COI / WP:ADVOCACY / WP:OR on the Catena (linguistics) page. The same issue appears here, and probably in many other places. Kaĉjo (talk) 08:44, 22 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Get/Got

Shouldn't this be considered an auxiliary verb as well? Ex: He got killed. The car got stolen. MToumbola (talk) 10:19, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It fails the tests listed in the article. Subject-auxiliary inversion is not possible (*Got he killed?) and the negation cannot appear after got (*He got not killed). See perhaps Alexiadou's 2006 article A note on non-canonical passives: the case of the get-passive (https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110892994.13/html) if you want more discussion. Kaĉjo (talk) 08:13, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]