Click here to listen to ‘The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries’
In the sentence “the horse has eaten an apple”, what is the word “has” doing? It’s not expressing ownership of something, like in “the horse has an apple”. (After all, the horse could have very sneakily eaten the apple.) Rather, it’s helping out the main verb, eat. Many languages use some of their verbs to help other verbs express grammatical information, and the technical name for these helping verbs is auxiliary verbs.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about auxiliaries! We talk about what we can learn about auxiliaries across 2000+ languages using a new linguistic mapping website called GramBank, why auxiliaries get pronounced subtly differently from the words they’re derived from, and how “be” and “have” are the major players of the auxiliary world (but there are other options too, like “do”, “let”, and “go”). We also put a whole bunch of farm animals in our example sentences this episode just so we have an excuse to make a very good wordplay at the end of the episode.
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Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
‘Tense and Aspectual be in Child African American English’ by Janice E. Jackson & Lisa Green
Yale Grammatical Diversity Project English in North America entry for ‘Invariant be’
@dietweeterei tweet on the origins of ‘have’ in English and German
‘The Syntax of Auxiliaries From a Cross-linguistic Perspective’ by Bronwyn M. Bjorkman
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Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
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Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, and our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
Here’s the link again to ‘The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries’
Thanks for listening, and stay Lingthusiastic!
Lauren & Gretchen