nouns, adjectives, and certain adverbials with their subjects and serves as a carrier for tense and subject-verb agreement.
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a student Copula: Mike
is clever in Jakarta
Auxiliary: Mike is studying English in the class progressive aspect
1. Auxiliary Verb ‘Be’
The oxford dictionary of English Grammar define auxiliary verb as a verb used in forming tenses, moods, and voices of other verbs. There are four
characteristics of English auxiliary verbs that distinguish them from true or full verbs; called NICE properties. NICE is an acronym stands for:
N egation
: auxiliaries add not or –n’t directly to the verb form e.g. don’t, can’t, cannot
I nversion
: they invert with the subject in questions e.g. May I go now?
C ode
: they can be used to avoid repetition of the whole verb phrase e.g. I love going to concerts, and so does Jane
E mphasis
: auxiliaries can be used for emphasis e.g. We will help you, I do remember.
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32
Marianne Celce-Murcia and Diane Larsen-Freeman, The Grammar Book, Second Edition, United Stated: Heinle Heinle, 1999, p.53
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Sylvia Chalker and Edmund Weiner, The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994 p.140
Auxiliary ‘be’ always occurs in conjunction with another verb, and it is thus referred to as an auxiliary verb. As an auxiliary verb, ‘be’ is used in
progressive verb tenses.
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For example: a
Rose is writing a letter - present progressive
b The student were listening to the music
- past progressive ‘Be’ is also an auxiliary element in the passive voice and in a number
of phrasal modals. In the passive, ‘be’ becomes the prototypical passive verb. It is unmarked and thus semantically neutral.
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a Diamonds were mined in South Africa
- passive b
She is going to go to USA tomorrow - with phrasal modal
2. Copula Verb ‘Be’
We use a special kind of verb to join an adjective or noun complement to a subject. These verbs can be called ‘copulas’ or ‘copular
verb’. Common copular verbs are: be, seem, appear, look, sound, smell, taste, feel, become, and get.
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The copula ‘be’ is different from other copulas. The rule for expanding the verb phrase makes a clear distinction between copular verbs like
‘be’ and other verbs in English. Celce-Murcia and Freeman 1999 suggest four reasons for making such a distinction. First of all, ‘be’ which is the most
34
Betty Schrampfer Azar, Understanding and Using English Grammar, third edition, New York: Longman, 2002 p.A-6
35
Celce-Murcia 1999, op.cit., p.348
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Michael Swan, Practical English Usage, second edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, p.135
frequent verb in English, has more distinct forms with respect to person, number and tense than any other verb in English. The traditional paradigm for
‘be’ compared with that for a lexical verb such as ‘walk’ makes this clear:
Table 2: Copula ‘Be’
COPULA ‘Be’ Present Tense
Past Tense Person
Singular Plural
Singular Plural
1
st
I am We are
I was We were
2
nd
You are You are
You were You were
3
rd
HeSheIt is They are
HeSheIt was They were
Table 3: Verb ‘Walk’
VERB ‘WALK’ Present Tense
Past Tense Person
Singular Plural
Singular Plural
1
st
I walk We walk
I walked We walked
2
nd
You walk You walk
You walked You walked
3
rd
HeSheIt walks They walk
HeSheIt walked They walked
A verb like ‘walk’ has two present-tense forms and one past-tense form. The verb ‘be’ on the other hand, has three distinct present-tense forms
and two past-tense forms. Second, the copula ‘be’ may be followed by adjective phrases, a
defining characteristics that it shares with many other copular verbs also called “linking verbs”. ‘be’ is the most frequent and the semantically most
neutral copula. ‘be’ can also be followed by noun phrases and adverbial prepositional phrases i.e., it is the grammatically most flexible copular verb:
attractive Alice is
an actress in London
Third, the syntactic behavior of the copula ‘be’, which behaves like an auxiliary verb and has operator function with regard to question formation,
negation, and other constructions, is very different from that of other verbs like ‘walk’ or other copular verbs, which require the addition of a ‘do’ auxiliary as
the operator if no other auxiliary verb is present. Finally, the copula ‘be’ does not occur in all languages, but all
languages have verbs. Especially in the present tense, many languages have nothing equivalent to the copula ‘be’.
In sum, a verb is copular if it is followed by a noun phrases, an adjective phrase, or an adverbial that specifically predicates something about
the subject of the verb.
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3. Problems in Using Verb ‘Be’
