Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: THEORY: Auxiliaries

From:Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>
Date:Sunday, December 29, 2002, 5:16
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. -- "There's no such thing as 'cool'. Everyone's just a big dork or nerd, you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." - overheard ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-Name: NikTaylor42

Reply

Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>