Re: THEORY: Auxiliaries

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 :)) ).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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

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