Some Amazing Discoveries of English Grammar

I have been researching on English grammar for quite some time now. Here are some of my findings. Readers are welcome to check back if I have said anything wrong or unbelievable.

Tenses

The language uses 18 tenses and not 12 as we have been opining all these days. Of them, two are “action less ones” and 16 are the action based varieties. Action means, you would notice some kind of movements or activities in them. For instance if I say, “I am eating my breakfast at the moment”, you can imagine in your mental eyes, my eating posture sitting at a dining table and mouth munching something.

Verbs

All normal verbs are action emanating words like run, kick, write, talk etc. You can see some or body movements in these verbs. In some verbs, you may not see any activity outwardly as such but action would be very much present in them but not visible. Sleep, dream, love, know, think etc fall under this category. What kind of actions are contained in these verbs? you would ask. Well, the invisible parts of a human body are in operation in them, aren’t they? For instance, our brain, the nerves, muscles and the blood circulation system are very much involved in these words and provide the action..

The next amazing thing about a verb is, we can never use it in a sentence by itself. It’s like a lame man needing a helper to go about. That helper is called “Auxiliaries”, so much so that an auxiliary and a verb form an inseparable pair in a sentence. Take the following sentences: We arewatching a T.V programme now. John has notreturned from office as yet. We did notsee your dog. I should havecorrected him immediately. ARE, HAS NOT, DID NOT, SHOULD HAVE are all auxiliaries. (We should not call them as “helping verbs”). For all this, there are only 32 auxiliaries in the language and we use them both for Active and Passive voice.

In the two “action less tenses”, we use action less verbs. There are only six action less verbs in the language. They are: AM, IS, ARE, WAS, WERE and BE. In actual fact BE is equal to AM,IS,ARE,WAS and WERE. When we use these words in an action less tense, they become 2-in -1 words, in that, they act as both verbs and auxiliaries. This is how we can justify that any verb will need an auxiliary-helper.

Tense

Now, back to Tenses. We identify the tense of a sentence by looking at the Auxiliary + Verb combination and not by looking at the verb alone. There is an A+V combination for every tense and is captive to that tense. The A+V of one tense cannot be repeated in any other.

Sometime people ask me, “Where is the auxiliary in the sentence, “I play hockey”.”.

As a matter of fact, the correct sentence is, “I doplay hockey”, wherein “do” is the auxiliary. We often silence the auxiliary for our convenience in this tense.

But when the sentence is negative – We don’t play hockey -, we cannot silence the auxiliary ever nor can we silence it in any form of questions.

The difference between any Positive answer and Negative answer in any tense lies in the auxiliary. While we use positive auxiliary in a positive sentence and negative auxiliary in a negative. We get the negative auxiliary by putting NOT after it; incidentally NOT is also an auxiliary. But for the Auxiliary, we wouldn’t know how to give a negative answer for nay question.

There is no English sentence without A+V or A.V. Being such a vital word, how is it we have been treating Auxiliaries as an unworthy fellows?

This much is enough for the time being, I think.