What we call the main verb of a sentence is the verb that tells about the action that’s central to the sentence. In the previous lesson, we wrote about person marking on main verbs. There are also helping verbs. In English, in a sentence like “I have eaten,” the main verb is “eaten” and the helping verb is “have.” Konkow has helping verbs too, with the most important one being ha ‘be, do’, and the less-common ma, which means the same thing and functions the same way.
If you use a helping verb in a sentence,
all the person marking goes on that,
not on the main verb!
Here are some of the pronoun + helping verb constructions we showed in the lesson on pronouns.
RULE: the (h) in ha ‘do, be’ disappears after a consonant.
Sample sentences:
In each of the words above, the helping verb carries a
person suffix for the subject.
NOTE that if the 1st.person subject is suffixed directly to a
helping verb it is different from the 1st person on main verbs.
On main verbs the 1st.Person suffix is
–(i).
Examples of first person on helping verbs:
Examples:
Put the right pronoun + helping verb form into the following sentences (Don’t bother with dashes and equals signs. Try to say the sentences out loud.)
There is one important thing we didn’t mention before about helping verbs. It’s not just pronouns that the helping verb can attach to – a helping verb will always attach to the first word in the sentence, even if it’s not a pronoun.
You can also say it this way:
In that one there is no pronoun, but “I” is indicated by the subect person suffix on the helping verb.
So in all the sentences above, you could either have a pronoun at the front of the sentence and the helping verb will attach to that, or leave the pronoun off and the helping verb will attach to whatever else is the first word of the sentence.
Here are other sentences showing various kinds of words that might be the first word of the sentence:
-kàs is a strong emphatic suffix. A loose translation might be “Where the heck are you going!”
As you see, in the first sentence, the helping verb with its person marking is attached to a question word (‘where’), and in the second and third sentences, it’s attached to a noun.
The helping verb can even be attached to the main verb itself if it is the first (and therefore generally the only) verb of the sentence.
RULE: the (h) in ha ‘do, be’ disappears after a consonant.
We saw the constructions where the helping verb is marked for subject and is attached to the object (minaj and myhaj). There are other ways to express the object too. Here’s one from the “Lost Swimmer” text, where there are two objects with the verb “give” – the first is “this” (what was given), and the second is “you” (the receiver of the gift). Here the helping verb is attached to first object, and the second object comes after.
Here the demonstrative for “this, that” is the first word in the sentence, and the helping verb attached to that; and then “you” follows it.
Take the sentences from PART 2.1 and remove the pronoun, and put the helping verb at the end of whatever the first word is. The first one was done for you above and now here:
Like main verbs, helping verbs can take other inflectional suffixes besides person marking. In the first example below you see both person and number on the helping verb.
In the next example, two suffixes involving uncertainty work together for a meaning that translates as “must have.”
Notice, however, that when you add more suffixes, instead of a -j on the helping verb, the first person -s is added at the end of the word. This is the same first-person suffix that main verbs take. The first person -j is only if it is the first suffix after the helping verb.
solbok’ojsam=
You used to have trouble singing.
kawaju= méjin.
I gave him a horse.
bélem= Ɂýkojkì:n.
I will go again.
solbok’ojsam=
You used to have trouble singing.
kawaju= méjin.
I gave him a horse.
bélem= Ɂýkojkì:n.
I will go again.
There are not many sentences in the data we have available that have plural pronouns with helping verb attached.
However, when Ultan asked for that sentence, he got a more complicated one:
This sentence has to mean “we, including you, ate acorn soup.” We could infer that the first sentence could mean “we (not including you) ate acorn soup”.
- Sentences might have just a main verb or could also have a helping verb. (The helping verb root is ha ‘be,do’, or less frequently ma, with the same meaning.)
- The helping verb is always attached to the end of the first word of the sentence. So it’s not really an independent word, but it’s not really a suffix either.
- The helping verb is marked for person and number. The first person is different from first person on main verbs. 1st.person “I” on a main verb -(i)s on a helping verb -j 2nd.person “you” on both main verbs and helping verbs: -no, -ni, -mo, or -m 3rd.person “he, she” Ø (that is, nothing, no suffix)
- The term number refers to how many we are talking about – just one person, or two (dual), or three or more (plural).
- number is also marked on verbs. Singular (just one person) has no marking. Dual (2 people
- It seems that the most common way to mark person and number in a sentence is to use a helping verb.
- The helping verb, marked for the subject, will attach to the first word of the sentence.
- The first word can be a pronoun or any other kind of word.
- When the helping verb is in the sentence, the main verb is not marked for person or any other inflectional suffix, and just takes the -n verb final suffix.
- When person is marked on the main verb, the sentence can but doesn’t have to have a pronoun too.
- When there is no helping verb, the person is marked on the main verb.
- For first or second person, a person marker on the main verb means something like a command or like doubtfulness.
(b) Pronoun plus main verb marking
(c) Pronoun+helping verb
Perhaps the most common way to mark person and number is on the
helping verb, which will generally attach to the first word of the
sentence, whether it is a pronoun or another part of speech.
Examples with pronoun:
Here it seems like the helping verb is actually on the 2nd word of the sentence. But as we remarked in the lesson on demonstratives, Ultan usually writes them as being attached to the next word, including in this case where he wrote it as one word. We usually separate the words, but this shows that even though demonstratives can stand alone in some cases, they are interpreted as connected to the following noun.
A number of interesting things about this word: one is the use of ma as the helping verb instead of ha. Ultan writes that ma and ha both mean the same thing and can be used interchangeably. The other is that both the pronoun and the auxiliary are both marked with their respective dual forms (-sa for the pronoun, -ja: for the helping verb).
Also, as noted before, once you have a suffix (other than person) on the helping verb, the first person marker is not -j but rather –(i)s, the same as for the person marker on the main verb.
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