Thomas Payne - Senior Linguistics Consultant, SIL International, USA

This  qualitative  study  investigates  the  uses  of  be  in  Contemporary  English.  Based  on  this  study, one  easy  claim  and  one  more  difficult  claim  are  proposed.  The  easy  claim  is  that  the  traditional distinction between be as a lexical verb and be as an auxiliary is faulty. In particular, 'copular-be', traditionally considered to be a lexical verb, is in fact a prototypical auxiliary. The harder claim is that  there  is  a  syntactic  distinction  between  lexical-be  and  auxiliary-be,  but  that  distinction  does not  coincide  with  the  copular  vs.  non-copular  usages.  Rather,  the  syntactic  distinction  between lexical and auxiliary be has an entirely different, semantic motivation based on stativity vs. activi-ty. In the process of providing evidence for these claims, the paper challenges a major assumption of traditional grammar – namely that every English sentence requires a lexical verb. This assump-tion is replaced by the notion that every English sentence requires Inflection. The proposals in this paper bridge the gap between theoretical and applied linguistics and have the potential to simplify significantly the conceptualization, teaching and learning of English grammar.

English syntax, auxiliary verbs, copular verbs, language teaching