Home

Topics: Auxiliary verb or Determiner

Auxiliary verb

Auxiliary verbs are 'helping verbs', which always accompany the main verb...

Determiner

A determiner is a word like a, the or my which comes before a noun to help specify what or who it refers to, e.g...

Determiners: Advanced

The following is taken from Bas Aarts's Grammarianism blog.

In a recent blog post on terminology I mentioned the word class of determiners, and said that they are a relatively new word class.

By 'relatively new' I mean 'early twentieth century'. The National Curriculum Glossary definition, determiner, is very brief, here I'll expand on it.

»

Verbs

Verbs have traditionally been described as ‘doing words’ or ‘action words’. This works well for some verbs, like sprint, chatter, eat. Here are some sentence examples with verbs which describe actions:

»

Verbs: Auxiliary verbs

A key distinction in the word class of verbs is between main verbs (also called lexical verbs) and auxiliary verbs:

»

Verbs: Modal verbs

Modal auxiliary verbs (or modals for short), as the name suggests, are a kind of auxiliary verb. They have most of the attributes of auxiliary verbs. They are a closed class that is identifiable as a short list, and they convey particular types of meaning.

Here is a table which lists the most important modal verbs (also called the core modals). It shows most of them in pairs as present and past tense forms, which makes them easier to remember.

»

Verbs: Nonfinite and finite

Verbs can be divided into finite and nonfinite forms. Finite verbs carry tense. So, past and present tense verb forms are finite. Nonfinite verbs do not carry tense, and do not show agreement with a Subject. Put differently, they are not 'limited' by tense or agreement.

The infinitive form of a verb is nonfinite. It is the form which follows to:

»

Verbs: Tense

Tense is a grammatical notion that refers to the way in which a language encodes the real world notion of time. Typically this is done through endings on verbs called inflections. Verbs are the only word class that can carry tense inflections (though they don't always do so). Verbs that carry a tense ending are called finite verbs.

»

Auxiliary verbs

What is an Auxiliary verb?

In this short video, we look at a special set of verbs, called auxiliary verbs.

Modal auxiliary verbs

Modal verbs are a special type of auxiliary verb. Watch this short video to learn more.

Nouns, adjectives and determiners

This short film introduces some basic ideas of grammar that everyone should know.

In this film Professor Bas Aarts introduces three basic categories: nouns, adjectives and determiners.

Englicious contains many resources for English language in schools, but the vast majority of them require you to register and log in first. For more information, see What is Englicious?

Englicious (C) Survey of English Usage, UCL, 2012-21 | Supported by the AHRC and EPSRC. | Privacy | Cookies