Semiauxiliaries And Periphrases Coursework Example

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Auxiliary verbs are the words used in forming tenses, voices, and moods of other verbs. They are divided into primary auxiliary verbs which include the verbs have, be, do and secondary auxiliary verbs which include the verbs will, would, shall, should, may, might and the verb must. Semi auxiliaries are formed based on the auxiliary verbs. For example, ‘be likely to’ and ‘be able to’ are semi auxiliaries constructed from the auxiliary verb ‘be’.The NICE properties of the verb ‘be’ as any other auxiliary verb include negation, inversion, contraction, ellipsis. Only auxiliary verbs can take not to form negative. For example, he is not happy. Inversion involves undergoing the subject-aux inversion. For example, “Is he happy?” Auxiliary verbs can also have a contracted form. For example, “Mercy isn’t taking the medicine”. We also have the ellipsis property whereby the complement of an auxiliary property may be elided. For example, Joseph is sad but Mary isn’t. The progressive verb ‘be’ indicates that an action has been in progress (Groß and Osborne 112). For example, “Jean has been riding” indicates that the act of riding is in progress. The verb ‘have’ in ‘have to’ do not express a completed action like in its perfective form. Verbs in perfective form use ‘have’ or ‘had’ plus past participle. For example, when we say he does not have enough money, there is now an indication that the action of having money is complete or not. However in perfective form, for example, I have submitted my project, show that the act of submitting is already complete.

In passivation, there is a slight difference between the auxiliaries and semi auxiliaries. Though in both the object in the active form is made the subject in the passive form, in auxiliary the verb ‘be’ is introduced together with the –en ending of the main verb (Groß and Osborne 115). For example, “Reilly read the book” can be converted to its passive form to be “the book was read by Reilly”. When using the form ‘be to’ and ‘have to’ then passivation will be as follows: “He has to admit me” will change to ‘I have to be admitted by him’. ‘The car was about to knock him down’ will change to “he was about to be knocked down by the car”.

Work cited
Groß, Thomas, and Timothy Osborne. “The Dependency Status of Function Words: Auxiliaries.” Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling 2015). (2015): 111-120.