Re: THEORY: Auxiliaries

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> 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".
Are you sure that's not meant to be simply "It's forever gone" with a
single word, rather than a phrase?

On the other hand, that's normal for progressives, any other order in
"He's always coming here" would sound bizarre to me.

> 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
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)

> (English auxiliaries are quite
> peculiar in that respect in that they don't behave like normal English verbs.
Well, I'd say that English auxiliaries are on their way to becoming
gramatical morphemes.

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