Being an Auxiliary

Lieselotte Anderwald’s new book Language Between Description and Prescription, out this week (from Oxford University Press, New York), embarks on an interesting project, and incidentally turns up evidence that several grammarians of the early 1800s were (to be candid) completely nuts. Bonkers. Out of their pointy heads.

The project is to compare the statements in 19th-century grammars with empirical evidence of language change, so that any influence of grumbling grammarians can be quantitatively assessed. But Anderwald encounters some real loonies among the grammarians of the period. I was particularly struck by the ones who were inclined to deny a very basic fact: that have, in addition to being the default verb of ownership or possession, has a separate grammaticized use as an auxiliary verb for marking what grammarians call the perfect tense. True, the latter evolved out of the former, but the speciation that separated them took place half a millennium ago.

Auxiliary verbs are traditionally defined as “helping verbs” — a vague and useless characterization. What defines them in English is their distinct syntactic behavior. An ordinary lexical verb like kill cannot precede the subject in interrogatives, but an auxiliary verb like will can (compare Will you kill that spider? with *Killed you that spider?); and only an auxiliary allows a following not to negate the clause (compare I will not kill it with *I killed not it).

But Anderwald discovered several grammars insisting that perfect-tense auxiliary have actually is the lexical verb of possession, and actually means “own” or “possess” in all occurrences.

Here’s Joshua Jones (English Grammar, 1833), discussing John has shut the door:

So the meaning “possess” is in there because John is the owner of an act? This is not a normal way of speaking. And if that counts as ownership, we could just as well say of someone who is destined to shut a door tomorrow that the act of door-shutting belongs to him as one of his future acts: He has it in the part of his life that is yet to come. So why can’t John has shut the door express the claim that John will shut the door? Simply asserting that “he has it,” with has emphasized, will not turn nonsense into sense.

Yet Jones seems to think it will. Look at how he treats the even thornier case of John has lost his knife:

His knife has the character of being a lost one? Jones seems to have forgotten that it was supposed to be John, not the knife, who possessed something!

And if possessing a character or property is sufficient to establish a connection between possession and completed action in the past, the connection has been stretched so far that it will apply vacuously to any predicate: If John is an idiot, then he has the character of being an idiot; if he is going to lose his knife tomorrow then he has the character of being a future knife-loser; and so on. The reasoning is absurd, and connection between perfect auxiliary have and lexical possession have follows only via self-delusion.

Furthermore, consider examples like It has been proved that there are infinitely many prime numbers, or There has recently been a landslide : Where is the ownership here? Who is the somebody or something that possesses something in such cases?

The exposition has completely lost contact with reality. And Jones isn’t alone. Anderwald found extremely similar material in grammars by Alexander McArthur (An Outline of English Grammar, 1836), Robert Gordon Latham (An Elementary English Grammar, 1843), and Thomas Weedon (A Practical Grammar of the English Language, 1848).

What we see in these works is a desperate attempt to make grammar seem more grounded in logic than it really is: a doomed struggle to extract the blood of rational explanation and historical continuity from the messy, illogical turnip of the contemporary language.