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
-
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.
-
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 (historically aorist) 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”.
Note that the verb být will not be tagged AUX if it is used as
copula (Moje auto je nové. “My car is new.”)
or as a content verb (V Praze je nové divadlo. “There is a new theatre in Prague.”)
It will be tagged VERB in these cases.
It is also possible that an auxiliary být modifies a lexical být
(V Praze by bylo nové divadlo. “There would be a new theatre in Prague.”)
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.
- Passive: Smlouva byla.
AUXpodepsána v Bílém domě. “The contract was signed in the White House.” - Copula: Smlouva byla.
VERBpodepsána 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 content verbs.
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
Treebank Statistics (UD_Czech)
There are 2 AUX lemmas (0%), 49 AUX types (0%) and 20795 AUX tokens (1%).
Out of 17 observed tags, the rank of AUX is: 17 in number of lemmas, 12 in number of types and 13 in number of tokens.
The 10 most frequent AUX lemmas: být, bývat
The 10 most frequent AUX types: by, bude, jsem, jsme, byl, budou, byla, být, je, bylo
The 10 most frequent ambiguous lemmas: být (VERB 25647, AUX 20737), bývat (VERB 154, AUX 58)
The 10 most frequent ambiguous types: by (AUX 7859, VERB 5, ADP 1, PART 1), bude (AUX 1843, VERB 864), jsem (AUX 1418, VERB 134), jsme (AUX 1404, VERB 176), byl (VERB 1246, AUX 913), budou (AUX 897, VERB 206), byla (VERB 765, AUX 733), být (VERB 1317, AUX 745), je (VERB 11424, PRON 887, AUX 713), bylo (VERB 1045, AUX 611)
- by
- AUX 7859: Jen cedule by byla jiná : FOR RENT ! - K PRONÁJMU !
- VERB 5: Bodejť by ne !
- ADP 1: Bylo to strašně těžké , dosáhnout souhlasu , aby by Spojené státy mohly jednat by all means , s využitím všech možných prostředků .
- PART 1: Podmínkou jeho uvolnění je uzavření dohody o dispozičním ( stand - by ) úvěru s Mezinárodním měnovým fondem .
- bude
- jsem
- jsme
- byl
- budou
- byla
- být
- je
- bylo
Morphology
The form / lemma ratio of AUX is 24.500000 (the average of all parts of speech is 2.195970).
The 1st highest number of forms (42) was observed with the lemma “být”: Nebudeš, bude, budem, budeme, budete, budeš, budiž, budou, budu, by, bych, bychom, byl, byla, byli, bylo, byly, bys, byste, být, býti, je, jsem, jsi, jsme, jsou, jsouce, jste, nebude, nebudeme, nebudete, nebudou, nebudu, nebyl, nebyla, nebyli, nebylo, nebyly, nejsme, nejsou, není, si
The 2nd highest number of forms (7) was observed with the lemma “bývat”: bývají, bývala, bývalo, bývaly, bývá, nebývají, nebývá
AUX occurs with 11 features: cs-feat/VerbForm (20795; 100% instances), cs-feat/Mood (16796; 81% instances), cs-feat/Number (12183; 59% instances), cs-feat/Negative (11902; 57% instances), cs-feat/Person (11357; 55% instances), cs-feat/Tense (11146; 54% instances), cs-feat/Voice (11146; 54% instances), cs-feat/Gender (3252; 16% instances), cs-feat/Animacy (711; 3% instances), cs-feat/Aspect (59; 0% instances), cs-feat/Style (4; 0% instances)
AUX occurs with 28 feature-value pairs: Animacy=Anim, Animacy=Inan, Aspect=Imp, Gender=Fem,Masc, Gender=Fem,Neut, Gender=Masc, Gender=Neut, Mood=Cnd, Mood=Imp, Mood=Ind, Negative=Neg, Negative=Pos, Number=Plur, Number=Plur,Sing, Number=Sing, Person=1, Person=2, Person=3, Style=Arch, Style=Coll, Tense=Fut, Tense=Past, Tense=Pres, VerbForm=Fin, VerbForm=Inf, VerbForm=Part, VerbForm=Trans, Voice=Act
AUX occurs with 51 feature combinations.
The most frequent feature combination is Mood=Cnd|VerbForm=Fin (5439 tokens).
Examples: by
Relations
AUX nodes are attached to their parents using 3 different relations: cs-dep/aux (14724; 71% instances), cs-dep/auxpass (6065; 29% instances), cs-dep/conj (6; 0% instances)
Parents of AUX nodes belong to 12 different parts of speech: VERB (19998; 96% instances), ADJ (530; 3% instances), NOUN (203; 1% instances), ADV (19; 0% instances), PRON (19; 0% instances), NUM (9; 0% instances), AUX (6; 0% instances), CONJ (3; 0% instances), PART (3; 0% instances), PROPN (3; 0% instances), SCONJ (1; 0% instances), SYM (1; 0% instances)
20790 (100%) AUX nodes are leaves.
0 (0%) AUX nodes have one child.
4 (0%) AUX nodes have two children.
1 (0%) AUX nodes have three or more children.
The highest child degree of a AUX node is 5.
Children of AUX nodes are attached using 3 different relations: cs-dep/conj (6; 46% instances), cs-dep/cc (5; 38% instances), cs-dep/punct (2; 15% instances)
Children of AUX nodes belong to 3 different parts of speech: AUX (6; 46% instances), CONJ (5; 38% instances), PUNCT (2; 15% instances)
AUX in other languages: [bg] [cs] [de] [el] [en] [es] [eu] [fa] [fi] [fr] [ga] [he] [hu] [it] [ja] [ko] [sv] [u]