Published 2026-03-31
Keywords
- Bantu,
- Tswana,
- ‘auxiliary verb + lexical verb’ constructions,
- dedicated auxiliaries,
- negation
Copyright (c) 2026 Denis Creissels
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
How to Cite
Abstract
This article discusses the subclass of Tswana auxiliaries that cannot be analysed as resulting from the grammaticalization of regular forms of verbs also used predicatively in the present state of the language. It describes the general characteristics of the dedicated auxiliaries, their individual properties and their possible etymologies. No generalization is possible about the way dedicated auxiliaries may depart morphologically from the regular inflection of synthetic verb forms, and there is a sharp contrast between a group of three auxiliaries ocurring in a variety of tense forms each, and the other ones, which have a very limited number of possible tense forms. Each of the auxiliaries selects particular forms of the lexical verb (either infinitive, circumstantial, sequential, or subjunctive). The negation of the analytic tenses formed by means of auxiliaries can often be obtained by putting the lexical verb in the negative form without modifying the auxiliary, but never by putting the auxiliary in the negative form without modifying the lexical verb.
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