Re: THEORY: Auxiliaries

En réponse à Arthaey Angosii <arthaey@...>:

>
> Why is this feature more common in VSO languages than in others?
You seem to have misunderstood me. That feature is not more common in VSO
languages than in others. It's rather English which is exceptional in having
difficulties (not that much. I've just seen today a setence going "it's for
ever gone". Whether this emphasizes "for ever" or not, the fact is that a
complete phrase is present between the auxiliary and the verb and this sentence
was from a native English speaker) to separate auxiliaries and verbs (Spanish
seems to be behaving the same).

  Do
> _most_
> VSO langs rearrange their word order when an auxilary is involved, or
> do
> _more_ VSO (than non-VSO) langs?
The problem you have is thinking that the languages "rearrange" sentences when
an auxiliary is present. It's not the case. The point is that when an auxiliary
is present, it is grammatically the *main verb* of the clause, and because of
that takes the same position as any verb (English auxiliaries are quite
peculiar in that respect in that they don't behave like normal English verbs.
In most languages with auxiliaries, those are undistinguishable from normal
verbs). The *lexical verb*, the one containing the semantic meaning, often
appears in a non-finite form (adjectival or nominal, or even adverbial. Arabic
is a bit different as the lexical verb is conjugated too) and thus takes the
normal place of non-finite forms. There is no "rearranging" of the sentence
order. In Dutch for instance, non-finite verbal forms always tend to go at the
end of the sentence, whether they are part of a compound construction with an
auxiliary or not. There is no "rearranging" of word order, just the normal word
order in use in the language.

  I ask because Asha'ille is VSO, but
> is
> agglutinating and thus often uses a suffix or infix instead of a
> separate
> auxilary verb.  There are a few suffixes that also have a separate
> auxilary
> form, and in those cases the word is placed before the verb but the
> sentence remains VSO.  For example:
>
> |shav| = "to talk"
> |-p-|  = past tense
> |pas|  = past tense
> |-i|   = 1s
>
> So "I talked" could be either |Shavpi| (the more common way of saying
> it)
> or |Pas shavi|.  Have I inadvertently made my language unnatural by
> doing this?
>
No, but I don't think "Pas" in your example can be called an auxiliary *verb*.
If it was, it should take the personal ending, since the particularity of an
auxiliary verb is to take over the conjugation (even in Arabic, where the
lexical verb is also conjugated, the auxiliary agrees completely with the
subject while the lexical verb doesn't agree with it in number and stays in the
singular even if the subject is plural). What you have is a past tense
*particle*, which needs to appear in front of the main verb. But you don't have
an auxiliary verb.

So there's nothing wrong with your construction, but to describe it best it's
better not to use the term "auxiliary" as it doesn't correspond to the way
auxiliaries are used in most languages.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

Replies