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ID#: 15836	Area: Archive	Submitted: 2005-06-14 11:31:41	Posted: 2005-06-30 03:01:02
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QDear 100 Hour Board,

In some foreign languages (specifically French, since I speak it) certain verbs use a different auxillary for their past tenses (i.e House of être/Mr and Mrs. Vandertramp). Can this ever legitimately happen in English? Like, why do we sing "The Lord is come" in Joy to the World and not "The Lord has come"?

- I am become very interested in this

ADear interested,

Yes, it can. From my classical understanding of grammar, the distinction is that "house of être" verbs are more like adjectives than like verbs, so they take the auxiliary that goes with adjectives. Allow me to illustrate:

J'ai vendu (la chaise). Je suis arrivée. Je suis américaine.

Notice that not only does the second verb take the same auxiliary as the adjective, it also agrees with the subject--just like the adjective.

This merry little digression aside, the verbs in English that can take "to be" are more or less of the same class as the French verbs--intransitive verbs of motion. This is why you can say "He is risen" instead of "He has risen." (You may point out that the first one refers to a change of state, not to a past tense of a verb. This is precisely my point--since there is no direct object, the verb affects only the subject.)

I'll let Melyngoch deal with it from a more modern perspective.

- Katya

ADear Way to be become,

There is a nearly-extinct type of verb in English called an unaccusative. Unaccusative verbs are nearly always verbs of motion; they're distinct because they don't assign any type of semantic role to the subject of the sentence. In a sentences such as

Esperanza sacked Troy.

we know that Esperanza is the person doing the sacking, the agent of the sacking -- that's the role that Esperanza gets from sacking. However, unaccusative verbs can take a subject which is "expletive" or semantically empty.

Herakles goes.
There goes Herakles.

Herakles refers to a person; There refers to nothing -- not even, in this case, a direction. Unaccusatives assign no semantic role to the left; they assign it exclusively to the right.

Unaccusative verbs are also the verbs which can be put in the past perfect using be instead of have. Sometimes, because many verbs of motion no longer behave as unaccusatives in modern English, this results in an antiquated-sounding structure, such as The Lord is come. Other times it seems perfectly normal: Zerubabel is gone.

As far as I can tell, the semantic roles are the reason. Be is the inflection for progressive verbs because it suggests a state. Verbs of motion, when in the perfect tense, are fundamentally change-of-state verbs, so it makes sense for them to take be. Other radical state verbs, like rain, also take non-semantic subjects: It's raining.

-A. A. Melyngoch

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