AUX: auxiliary verb
Definition
The only truly auxiliary verb in Czech is být “to be”, and its variant (with separate lemma) bývat “to usually be”. It accompanies the lexical verb of a verb phrase and expresses grammatical distinctions not carried by the lexical verb.
Examples
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Future tense. Finite future form of být is combined with infinitive of the lexical verb. The auxiliary expresses person, number and tense: budu dělat “I will do”, budeš dělat “you will do”, budou dělat “they will do”. Note that a limited set of verbs can form future morphologically, without the auxiliary.
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Past tense in the first and second person. Finite present form of být is combined with past participle of the lexical verb. The auxiliary expresses person and number, the participle expresses gender and number: dělal jsem “I did.
Masc”, dělala jsem “I did.Fem”, dělal jsi “you did.Masc”, dělali jsme “we did.Masc”. -
Conditional mood. Conditional form of být is combined with past participle of the lexical verb. The auxiliary expresses person and number, the participle expresses gender and number: dělal bych “I would do.
Masc”, dělala bych “I would do.Fem”, dělal bys “you would do.Masc”, dělali bychom “we would do.Masc”. -
Passive voice. A form of být (in various tenses and moods or in the infinitive) is combined with passive participle of the lexical verb. The auxiliary expresses person, number, tense and mood, the participle expresses gender, number and voice: je udělán “he is done”, bude udělán “he will be done”, byl udělán “he was done”, byl by udělán “he would be done”, buď udělán “be done”, být udělán “to be done”.
In UD v1, where copulas were not tagged AUX, many instances of být were tagged VERB.
In UD v2, copulas are tagged AUX and the definition of copula sentences has been extended
to location-existentials (V Praze je nové divadlo. “There is a new theatre in Prague.”)
Hence almost all occurrences of být should be now tagged AUX.
Only pure existentials without location (Vůle je a vždycky byla. “There is and always was the will.”)
have a non-auxiliary být, which should be tagged VERB.
Note that the passive participle may be also used as nominal predicate with copula.
Hence it may be difficult to distinguish a passive construction from a copula construction.
The former focuses on the process while the latter emphasizes the result.
However, since copulas are now tagged AUX, the distinction no longer affects the part-of-speech tag:
- Passive: Smlouva byla.
AUXpodepsána v Bílém domě. “The contract was signed in the White House.” - Copula: Smlouva byla.
AUXpodepsána červeným inkoustem. “The contract was signed in red ink.”
Modal verbs are not auxiliaries
Czech modal verbs are not considered auxiliary and they are tagged VERB,
in accord with the annotation in the Prague Dependency Treebank.
Their behavior is only slightly different from other content verbs.
Constructions with mít and passive participle
There is a construction parallel to the perfect tenses of Germanic and Romance languages: mít “to have” + neuter singular passive participle, e.g. mít (něco) uděláno “to have (something) done”. They can also apply to intransitive verbs: mít vyhráno “to have won”. Sometimes the verb mít shares the subject (actor) with the participle, but in other contexts such relation is not guaranteed: mít (někde něco) napsáno “to have (something) written (somewhere)”. None of these constructions is considered a separate tense in the Czech grammar and the verb mít is not analyzed as auxiliary.
References
- Loos, Eugene E., et al. 2003. Glossary of linguistic terms: What is an auxiliary verb?
- Wikipedia
- Jarmila Panevová, Eva Benešová, Petr Sgall. 1971. Čas a modalita v češtině (Tense and modality in Czech). Acta Universitatis Carolinae, Philologica Monographia XXXIV, Universita Karlova Praha
AUX in other languages: [bej] [bg] [bm] [cs] [cy] [da] [el] [en] [es] [et] [fi] [fro] [fr] [ga] [grc] [gub] [hu] [hy] [it] [ja] [ka] [kk] [kpv] [ky] [myv] [no] [pcm] [pt] [qpm] [ru] [sl] [sv] [tr] [tt] [uk] [u] [urj] [yue] [zh]