ENGL1007 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Big, Bigger, Biggest, German Verbs, Nonfinite Verb
17 Aug 2018
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Auxiliary verbs: to have and to be - help the principle verb to create a complete meaning. Also having this function are modal auxiliaries (can, may, should, shall, will, ought) Their function is to qualify or modulate a verb in a singular way. e. g. : "you can swim. " can is very different to "are". The modal meaning don"t concern fact, whether the swimming is happening or has happened, but things are not yet a matter of fact. Talking about the future in english as though it were a tense, but actuality futurity is expressed differently, not inflectionally like past and present tense forms of verbs. There is no suffix for it; there is no "future tense" in english if we think of tense as something that must be expressed with a suffix. Modal auxiliaries don"t have any non-finite forms (you can"t put "to" in front of them; no prepositions).
