AUX: auxiliary
Definition
An auxiliary is a function word that accompanies the lexical verb of a
verb phrase and expresses grammatical distinctions not carried by the
lexical verb, such as person, number, tense, mood, aspect, voice or evidentiality.
It is often a verb (which may have non-auxiliary uses as well) but many languages
have nonverbal TAMVE markers and these should also be tagged AUX. The class AUX
also include copulas (in the narrow sense of pure linking words for nonverbal predication).
Less commonly, an auxiliary may just cross-reference person and number of a core argument,
without also expressing any TAMVE (tense, aspect, mood, voice, evidentiality) feature.
This only applies if the auxiliary is spelled as a separate word; if it is written together
with the verbal stem, annotate the cross-reference (agreement) features on the verb and
do not attempt to cut the agreement morpheme as a separate syntactic word. Even if written
separately, the default approach is to treat such words as personal pronouns (PRON).
But if there are strong arguments against a pronoun analysis, it is possible to use AUX
instead. Issue #782 discusses
examples from K’iche’ [quc].
Modal verbs may count as auxiliaries in some languages (English). In
other languages their behavior is not too different from the main
verbs and they are thus tagged VERB.
Note that not all languages have grammaticalized auxiliaries, and
even where they exist the dividing line between full verbs and
auxiliaries can be expected to vary between languages. Exactly
which words are counted as AUX should be part of the
language-specific documentation.
Examples
- Tense auxiliaries: has (done), is (doing), will (do)
- Passive auxiliaries: was (done), got (done)
- Modal auxiliaries: should (do), must (do)
- Verbal copulas: He is a teacher.
- Agreement auxiliaries: [quc] la (2nd person singular formal), alaq (2nd person plural formal)
References
AUX in other languages: [bej] [bg] [bm] [cs] [cy] [da] [el] [en] [es] [et] [fi] [fro] [fr] [ga] [grc] [gub] [hu] [hy] [it] [ja] [ka] [kk] [kpv] [ky] [myv] [no] [pcm] [pt] [qpm] [ru] [sl] [sv] [tr] [tt] [uk] [u] [urj] [xcl] [yue] [zh]