THEORY: Auxiliaries

On Sun, 16 Apr 2000, DOUGLAS KOLLER wrote:

> From: "Nik Taylor"
>
> > So that Géarthnuns could be called SAOV, where A means "auxilliary"?
>
> Much as I'm tempted to call it an auxiliary and call it a day, when I began
> groping for terms to explain the shléts, I trudged through bazillions of
> dictionaries in various languages and the term "auxiliary" seemed
> inextricably tied to verb-ness (aren't they often called "helping *verbs*"
> in English?). The shléts is too weak to stand on its own, and doesn't derive
> from a verb which had a meaning at one point.
>
> Do you want to go?   Yes, I *do*.
>
> Öçek la ba kadiz höhüraf?
> you-nom present-shléts ba go want-interrogative.mood
>
> *Shau, sí la (not possible).
> Yes, I do.
>
> Shau, hereçkeveçö (üraf).
> Yes, thus [what you just said] (want). Yes, I do.
>
> The shléts can occasionaly hang out on its own in interrogative tags, but
> usage is extremely limited:
>
> Öçek la ba kadiz höhüraf?
> Do you want to go?
>
> Shau, kfö Émars la hö?
> Yes. And what about Mary (does she want to go?)?
>
> Actually, now that I think about it, this is more a case where "höhüraf" has
> been truncated to the essential interrogative prefix, "hö-".
>
> So I usually cop out and call it a "shléts" once it's been introduced. There
> are a couple of other words like "höi", "ba", and "sho" which I also can't
> compartmentalize so neatly, but I'll hit the list up for suggestions in
> another posting. :)
_An Encyclopedia of AUX_, coauthored by Susan Steele, Adrian
Akmajian (and others), goes into extensive detail about the
category of 'auxiliary'. There are two Uto-Aztecan languages
which come to mind when I think of auxiliaries: Luiseño (Takic
branch of Northern Uto-Aztecan) and Tohono O'odham (Tepiman
branch of Southern Uto-Aztecan). Both languages have second
position clitics which contain information about person and
number of subject and tense/aspect. Nothing verbal beyond that.

The O'odham auxiliary paradigm is given below:

IMPERF

    sing   pl

1.  'añ   'ac
2.  'ap   'am
3.  'o    'o

PERF

1.  'ant  'att
2.  'apt  'amt
3.  'at   'at

These auxiliaries also occur in short forms (created by lopping
off the glottal stop-vowel, and in the case of _'o_, replacing
it with _k_).

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu