auxiliary

An auxiliary (also known as an auxiliary verb) is a verb which is used with another to help make aspectual, modal or temporal distinctions. In a verb phrase such as:

may be going

‘may’ and ‘be’ are auxiliaries and ‘going’ is the headverb. There are several auxiliaries in English:

1 BE is used in the expression of progressive aspect:

is practising

were struggling

2 BE is used also in the expression of the passive:

were followed were robbed

and in this usage BE triggers off the use of the past participle of the following verb.

3 HAVE is used in the expression of perfective aspect:

have finished

had disappeared

4 the modals (i.e. can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would) which are used in the expression of ability, futurity, insistence, intention, obligation, permission, possibility and willingness:

can swim

will arrive must go

5 There is a fifth auxiliary, DO, which is often called the dummy auxiliary because although it is syntactically significant it has little semantic value. When there is no other auxiliary in the verb phrase, DO is used to form negatives and interrogatives:

(he) sings

(he) doesn’t sing does (he) sing?

does (he) not sing?/doesn’t (he) sing?

The auxiliaries BE, HAVE and DO can also occur as headverbs:

Auxiliary Headverb

(I) am singing (I) am a steeplejack

(I) have sung (I) have two dogs and a cat

(I) don’t sing (I) do my tax returns

but when these verbs and the modals are used as auxiliaries they have certain characteristics:

1 they always precede the headverb

2 they are not obligatory in affirmative, declarative sentences: (you) try

3 they can be used anaphorically:

He was trained in Switzerland.

Was he? (=Was he trained in Switzerland?)

4 they can be used for emphasis, especially in emphatic affirmation or denial:

We have been followed.

You don’t practise hard enough.

5 they can be followed directly by ‘n’t’: (he) mightn’t go

(he) hasn’t gone

(he) isn’t trying

(he) doesn’t go

6 all the auxiliaries with the exception of may, might and did have strong and weak forms:

I am striving/I’m striving he has gone/he’s gone she will go/she’ll go

See: BE, DO, dummy subject, HAVE, modality, quasi-modal, strong and weak forms, verb phrase.

back formation

This process involves the formation of a new word from an assumed but imaginary root of an existing word. A change of word class always occurs. For example, the verb televise is a back formation from the noun television and the verb edit from the noun editor. The new word is formed by analogy with other existing words: televise is similar to revise (and television to revision); and edit to audit (and editor to auditor). Because back formations result from analogy with words which already exist, the new formations are readily acceptable and are indistinguishable from words with conventional roots. Thus burgle seems as regular as gurgle or curdle: only the historical records reveal that burglar existed first.

Other well-known back formations include: automate (automation), craze (crazy), donate (donation), enthuse (enthusiasm), filibust (filibuster), liaise (liaison) and psych (psychology).

See: clipping, word formation.

Bahamian English

Linguistically as well as geographically, these islands with a population of under a quarter of a million lie between the Caribbean and the southern USA. There is a spectrum of varieties in the Bahamas, ranging from standard US usage through nonstandard usages to a creolised English which shares features with US Black English and Caribbean creoles.

See: Black English, Caribbean English, creole, West Indian English.

Barbadian English

This island has speakers of several different varieties of English, from Standard English to ‘Bajan’, a form that shares lexical features with Caribbean creoles. Since 1625 Barbados has had close links with Britain and its speakers have been renowned for the excellence of their English. Increasingly, the English of the 250,000 Barbadians is being influenced by US rather than UK norms.

See: Caribbean English, creole, West Indian English.

barbarism

Barbarism is a term used to condemn words formed from or even cognate with words with the same function but of superior status. For example, disassociate is regarded as a barbarism because an etymologically more correct form dissociate exists. It is not, however, difficult to see how dis+associate came to be formed, nor to find analogous words (dis+agree, dis+allow, dis+appoint). Other so-called barbarisms are:

adaption (adaptation) cf. adoption educationalist (educationist) cf. nationalist grievious (grievous) cf. devious

orientate (orient) cf. meditate/meditation preventative (preventive) cf. tentative pronounciation (pronunciation) cf. pronounce

reoccur (recur) cf. reaffirm

untactful (tactless) cf. unhelpful

It is likely that some barbarisms will oust their more respectable counterparts. Ultimately, it is general usage, rather than etymological pedigree, that determines the survival of a word.

The term barbarism is sometimes used to refer disparagingly to foreign, vulgar, uneducated or impolite expressions.

See: analogy, cognate, etymology.

base form

The base form, which is also known as the root or the stem, is the unmodified word, that is, the singular form of a noun (e.g. bird and not birds), the imperative form of a verb (go and not goes, going or gone), and the positive form of an adjective (big and not bigger or biggest). Affixes are added to the base form:

dis+respect+ful un+like+ly

See: affix, derivation, inflection.

Basic English

Many people have believed that international co-operation would improve if a universally understood language existed. Esperanto was invented to fulfil such a purpose but it has never received the attention its creator hoped for. English has, over the last two hundred years, become an international language, employed in every continent and increasingly recognised as the world’s lingua franca. It was already a widely-used second language in the 1930s when C.K. Ogden created Basic English, a reduced and simplified form of English which Ogden believed would be easy to teach and learn. Basic English consisted of 850 words:

1 600 ‘Things’, ranging from account to year

2 150 ‘Qualities’, including able, bad, good and young

3 100 ‘Operators’, containing 16 full verbs such as BE and PUT, two modals may and will, a number of pronouns, adverbs, determiners, conjunctions, prepositions and the words yes, no and please

The rules of Basic English were simple:

1 all plurals were formed by adding -s

2 adverbs were formed by adding -ly to qualifiers (some but not all of the ‘Qualities’) 3 comparatives and superlatives were formed by using more and most

4 questions were formed by inversion and the use of DO 5 verbal and pronominal ‘Operators’ conjugated in full

The following verses of St Luke’s account of the Prodigal Son are in Basic English:

But he made answer and said to his father, See, all these years I have been your servant, doing your orders in everything: and you never gave me even a young goat so that I might have a feast with my friends

Basic English was an attempt to make English easier for learners. It failed because: 1 the English produced was unnatural:

I have love for you. and not I love you.

2 it did not lead on to the mastery of natural English

3 the 850 words are the minimum one can use. 150 extra words were necessary for the translation of the Bible. A normal Bible uses approximately 6,400 words.

4 many words were allowed to be used both literally and metaphorically. See: pidgins and creoles.

bath, bathe

These verbs cover different but overlapping semantic areas in the UK and the USA. Because their spelling differs only in the base forms, the distinctions between them are becoming blurred.

Bath as a verb is used in the UK. It means ‘wash oneself or someone else’ usually in a bathtub:

I’ll bath after you.

Shall I bath the baby?

US usage would prefer bathe in the above examples or distinct periphrastic phrases:

I’ll take a bath after you.

Shall I give the baby a bath?

UK speakers also use the expressions have/take a bath.

Bathe is used more extensively in the USA where its meanings include ‘give a bath to’ and ‘apply a liquid to something’:

I’ll bathe the baby.

Bathe your eyes in a saline solution.

In conservative UK usage, bathe tends to be confined to alleviating pain, as in the second example. Increasingly, however, US usage is spreading among the young.