AUX: auxiliary verb
Irish does not have auxiliary verbs per se. Therefore what could be considered “auxiliary” verbs in other languages (I have to go, I am going) are not labelled as AUX in the Irish data. However, the v2 guidelines posit that Copula verbs should be labelled as AUX instead of VERB. Copula usage is extremely frequent in Irish, and as all copular verbs in UD are recognised as Auxiliaries, we tag the copula as AUX.
There are two verbs to be in Irish: the substantive verb bí, which inflects for tense, mood and person as per all Irish verbs and the copula is, which only has two tensed forms - present/future and past/conditional. For that reason, the Irish POS tagset differentiates the copula by using the POS tag AUX and labelling the substantive verb as VERB. In the literature on Irish syntax, there is some discussion over the Irish copula’s syntactic role, whether it is a verb or a linking particle (Carnie, 1997). The role normally played is that of a linking element between a subject and a predicate.
Bí, as a verb, uses separate particles in negative and interrogative constructions with all tense and mood forms. However, as the copula does not inflect for mood, gender and number in the same way, it uses its own forms in these constructions.
The main forms are:
- is (positive - present/ future)
- ní (negative - present/ future)
- ba (positive - conditional/ past)
- níor (negative - conditional/ past)
- an (interrogative/ positive - present/ future)
- ar (interrogative/ positive - conditional/ past)
- nach (interrogative/ negative - present/ future)
- nár (interrogative/ negative - conditional/ past).
Our analysis follows a copula-predicate-subject analysis as per Uí Dhonnchadha (2009), which applies to other constructions that we list here:
- Classificatory constructions: Is lá deas é “It is a nice day” [lit. `is day nice it’]
- Ownership constructions: Is liomsa é “It is mine” [lit `is with-me it’]
- Fronting constructions: Is ise a chonaic sé “It is she whom he saw” [lit. `Is her REL saw he’]
- Identification constructions: Is iad na buaiteoirí “They are the winners” [`is them the winners’]
- Idiomatic use: Is maith liom tae “I like tea” [`is good with-me tea’]
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]