5/31/2023 0 Comments What is a helping verbThere are five more helping verbs: may, might, must, can, could! Have, has, had, do, does, did, will, would, shall and should. Helping verbs, helping verbs, there are 23!Īm, is, are, was and were, being, been, and be, Two years earlier, his fifth-grade English teacher had taught the class a song that had "all 23 of them," and they'd all learned it, and he and his friends could still sing it even now. In English, these are primarily the forms of be, forms of have, forms of do, and the modals such as may, might, and would. I mentioned them to Doug, using the less technical name helping verbs, and Doug surprised me by enthusiastically jumping into the conversation. But one day I happened to be thinking, out loud, about auxiliary verbs. Comments like "Wait-is this a linguistics thing?" and "Mom, Dad's talking grammar again!" have found their way into the conversation at times. We're coming up on National Grammar Day (it's March 4th, as in "march forth"), so we asked our resident linguist Neal Whitman to tackle a topic sure to warm the cockles of grammar-lovers' hearts: helping verbs! But how many are there? And can you fit them all into a catchy song?Īs a rule, my sons aren't thrilled to talk about grammar with me.
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