The Categorical Status and Functions of Auxiliaries in Shona by Nhira Edgar Mberi

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The first predicate is the one which has the deficient verb which syntactically more important of the two because it bears the mood and tense of the total predicate. - Semantically the auxiliary or deficient verb is incomplete. It carries incomplete action, action which can only be completed by another subordinate verb or copulative. Mkhatshwa (1991:76) goes to point out that, even from the traditionalist’s point of view, the widely attested fact that auxiliaries derive from verbs in many languages of the world holds also for Bantu languages.

Because these students had very little training on how to conduct research, they had to go through a one-week intensive course on how to conduct interviews. Lexicographers from the University of Gothenburg and University of Oslo were also involved in training the students in the one-week intensive course. Most of the student research assistants conducted research in their home districts during their college vacation, and this made it easier for them to be easily accepted in the communities in which they were conducting research.

The main feature being the dependent nature of auxiliary, which makes them unstable utterances that would need a subordinate verb or copulative (predicative) formation to make them stable. The first type is the one that has generally been referred to as the defective verb, as shown in examples 1-5. This type of auxiliary is of the CV type, that is, it made up of consonant(s) and a vowel. The defective verb is therefore different from other lexical verbs in that the radical of the lexical verb always ends in a conso- 35 Defining Auxiliary nant while that of the defective verb ends in a vowel.