Re: THEORY: Auxiliaries

Christophe Grandsire nevesht:
>
>En réponse à Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>:
>
> >
> > Are you sure that's not meant to be simply "It's forever gone" with a
> > single word, rather than a phrase?
> >
>
>Well, it was written with two words. Also, whether it is written in one
>word or
>two doesn't change much of my analysis, since "forever" is quite clearly
>identical to "for ever" :)) .
>
> >
> > In Uatakassi, auxiliaries actually *incorporate* the lexical verb,
> > becoming a single complex verb.  Patients and instrumentals can also
> > be
> > incorporated into the verb, and a verb with an incorporated noun can
> > be
> > itself incorporated into the auxiliary, so that you can have a complex
> > verb meaning something like "I can eat glass" (taklankaftipasuki to be
> > exact, if you mean "at this moment, I can eat glass", lit.
> > glass-eat-can-I-NonPunctual)
> >
>
>Interesting construction. I knew Uatakassi was clearly agglutinative, but
>now
>it looks more polysynthetic to me...
>
> >
> > Well, I'd say that English auxiliaries are on their way to becoming
> > gramatical morphemes.
> >
>
>It's my opinion exactly. Just like French subject and object pronouns have
>become actually verbal prefixes that are separated from the verb only by
>the
>conservative orthography, English auxiliaries are clearly becoming mood and
>aspect prefixes (the fact that they are losing accent and that their "past"
>forms slowly lose their past meanings and become separate modals is a clear
>sign. The last one is clear with the pair "can-could" where the past form
>is
>clearly losing its past status to become a separate modal indicating a
>smaller
>probability than "can". This step is far from finished though :)) ).
>
If anything, they're clitics now(if unstressed), and becoming *suffices* to
the subject, except in questions, where they're becoming prefices.




-Wayne Chevrier







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