Lingthusiasm Episode 81: The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries
In the sentence “the horse has eaten an apple”, what is the word “has” doing? It’s not expressing ownership of something, like in “the horse has an apple”. (After all, the horse could have very sneakily eaten the apple.) Rather, it’s helping out the main verb, eat. Many languages use some of their verbs to help other verbs express grammatical information, and the technical name for these helping verbs is auxiliary verbs.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about auxiliaries! We talk about what we can learn about auxiliaries across 2000+ languages using a new linguistic mapping website called GramBank, why auxiliaries get pronounced subtly differently from the words they’re derived from, and how “be” and “have” are the major players of the auxiliary world (but there are other options too, like “do”, “let”, and “go”). We also put a whole bunch of farm animals in our example sentences this episode just so we have an excuse to make a very good wordplay at the end of the episode.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
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In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the jobs that people go on to do after a linguistics degree! We talk about Lauren's new academic article in a fancy linguistics journal about a blog post series she's been running for 8 years, interviewing 80 people who studied linguistics, from a minor to a doctorate level, and their experience and advice for non-academic jobs.
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Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
Etymonline entry for ‘auxiliary’
Gretchen’s twitter thread on auxiliaries
Martin Haspelmath’s tweet on the history of WALS
‘Tense and Aspectual be in Child African American English’ by Janice E. Jackson & Lisa Green
All Things Linguistics post on ‘habitual be’
Yale Grammatical Diversity Project English in North America entry for ‘Invariant be’
@dietweeterei tweet on the origins of ‘have’ in English and German
Wikipedia entry for ‘habeo’ in Latin
Grambank entry for ‘mood’
Grambank entry for ‘aspect’
Grambank entry for ‘tense’
Grambank entry for ‘negation’
Grambank entry for ‘passive’
‘The Syntax of Auxiliaries From a Cross-linguistic Perspective’ by Bronwyn M. Bjorkman
Wikipedia entry for ‘Nande languge’
‘Auxen’ tweet by Kirby Conrod
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Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, and our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
