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This page pertains to UD version 2.

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

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:

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


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] [xcl] [yue] [zh]