Open AccessThe Auxiliary Verb in Natchez
Author(s) -
Mary R. Haas
Publication year - 1979
Publication title -
proceedings of the annual meeting of the berkeley linguistics society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2377-1666
pISSN - 0363-2946
DOI - 10.3765/bls.v5i0.3258
Subject(s) - plural , modal verb , verb , linguistics , mathematics , present tense , psychology , computer science , philosophy
Natchez verbs are inflected for person (first, second, and third), for number (singular, dual, and plural), and for tense-mode (present, past, optative). There are two main kinds of verbs. There are, first, active verbs which are directly inflected only for the distinction between singular and plural. All the rest of the inflectional paraphernalia is carried by the auxiliary verb with which it obligatorily occurs. Secondly, there are inflected verbs which occur in two subcategories, (i) inpendent inflected verbs and auxiliary verbs. The two inflected subcategories are inflected alike except for the plural number. The independent inflected verbs have their own special type of plural formation. The auxiliary verbs, on the other hand, do not since that is shown by the active verb.