Sammendrag
The study attempts to determine whether or not there are auxiliary verbs in Kiswahili and how we are to understand the term auxiliary verb, if it exists. (1) nilikuwa nikisoma kitabu 'I was reading a book' contains a traditional auxiliary verb nilikuwa 'I was' and a main verb nikisoma 'I am reading' of Kiswahili. According to Halliday (1985: 175), the English verbal group 'has been eating' consists of a) a finite verb, b) an auxiliary verb, and c) a lexical verb, which is also the main verb and expresses the Event. This means that an auxiliary verb is not a finite verb. It follows that many of the verbs called 'auxiliary verbs' by linguists and grammarians do not qualify as auxiliary verbs because they are finite. If Halliday (1985) is correct in his analysis, then (1) has two finite verb sequences, V1 nilikuwa and V2 nikisoma, the last of which is also the main verb. There is, therefore, no auxiliary verb in the group. We discover suddenly that most of the so-called auxiliary-main verb constructions in Kiswahili are actually serial verb constructions that lack auxiliary verbs. Our study has, therefore, discovered that the commonest type of verb sequence in Kiswahili does not have an auxiliary-main verb syntax. The discovery is the first since the description of the language in 1850.
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