IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science (IOSR-JHSS) Volume 25, Issue 4, Series. 4 (April. 2020) 01-06 e-ISSN: 2279-0837, p-ISSN: 2279-0845. www.iosrjournals.org DOI: 10.9790/0837-2504040106 www.iosrjournals.org 1 |Page The Auxiliary Verbs and Their Fuctions: An Overview Bakoji Mohammed Fema PhD 1 , Haruna Shuaibu 2 , Alhaji Abubakar 3 1 Department of English Aminu Saleh College of Education, Azare Bauchi State 2 Department of English Aminu Saleh College of Education, Azare Bauchi State 3 Department of English Aminu Saleh College of Education, Azare Bauchi State Abstract: Several researchers have pointed out that the verbal group, being an obligatory element of the clause structure, carries high syntactic and semantic loads. As such, it is an area of maximum divergence and one of the most difficult aspects to master particularly by learners of English as a second language. On this note, this paper discusses the English auxiliary verbs, being integral components of the verbal group. The discussion is done through reviewing the works of different authors on the auxiliaries distinguishing the two sets - the primary auxiliaries (have, be & do) and the modal auxiliaries (can, could, dare, may, might, must, need, ought, shall, should, will & would). Each set of the auxiliaries are discussed with much emphasis on different usages to illustrate how crucial the auxiliaries are, as far as the conjugation of the verbal group is concerned. Key Words: Primary Auxiliaries, Model Auxiliaries, Verbal Group --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date of Submission: 06-03-2020 Date of Acceptance: 20-04-2020 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I. INTRODUCTION Auxiliary verbs are among the grammatical elements that play crucial roles in the construction of grammatical units particularly clauses and sentences. They (auxiliaries) sometimes require the presence of lexical verbs to function within verbal groups; however, that does not deny their significance as grammatical sentence elements. Despite their syntactic dependency, auxiliary verbs enjoy high frequency as far as the use of sentence elements is concerned. So, it is worthy to note that, the auxiliary verbs although require lexical verbs, have semantic indispensability and sometimes some of them function as main verbs in sentences and convey effective meanings on their own. The English Auxiliary Verbs Murthy (1998) explains auxiliary verbs as those verbs that are used to form negatives, questions and tenses on one hand, and used to express various moods and mental attitudes like hope, expectation, possibility and futurity (modal) on the other hand. Christophersen and Sandved (1969) discuss the English auxiliary verbs through categorizing them into four sub- groups which are according to the form of the verb with which the auxiliary occurs. 1. The first group consists of the auxiliaries which are used with the base form of the verb, the form that is often called the ‘bare or plain infinitive’ the following are examples of such auxiliaries: 2. The second group consists of auxiliaries which are used with the –ing form of the verb: