« Common Mistakes in English Grammar Corrector © – Get it Now!
English Grammar and Sentence Software © – Try it Now! »

2. Modal Verbs and Auxiliary Verbs. English Grammar Lesson

Yossarian the Grammarian provides a quick review of modals and auxiliaries, and shows you how many words long a verb can be. English grammar and English language.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 at 8:14 pm and is filed under Grammar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

25 Responses to “2. Modal Verbs and Auxiliary Verbs. English Grammar Lesson”

  1. Hello mrthoth. Your videos are awesome. You make it so easy to understand. I have a question. If I follow your videos, ALL of your videos, will I then at the end learn the entire english grammer? I have no problem speaking english but in the future I want to be an english teacher in my country and need to learn the english grammer from the beginning. Please help : )) Thank you!!

  2. Awesome video!

  3. iam a somalian and i thought no one could teach me about verbs and then you came a long if keep listing to you i might go to college sooner than later

  4. omg, ´will have been being played´ -.- … in fact a huge combination. Thanks for the lessons.

  5. oh my gosh… your my heroo!! i love how you explain everything!!

  6. Cheers for the reply.

    I had an argument with a colleague where I proposed a similar scenerio to the one you describe for a five verb sentence. I said, “We can make a future continuous passive, but we just don’t use it commonly”; he said, “Rubbish!”

    The text we use, Cutting Edge, says the same as the Google sites from the search you suggest: ‘It’s uncommon’. But there’s no point where the form is practiced in our text, so the implication is that it’s ‘wrong’.

    Keep well.

  7. I certainly hope there are no textbooks that say, “The future perfect progressive (or continuous) is impermissible.” It is perfectly fine on either side of the Atlantic. (”By next week, I will have been working on this job for a year.”) I just Googled the verb “will have been working,” in fact, and got more than 45,000,000 hits. Certainly it’s rarer in the passive than in the active, however. But if you Google “will have been being,” you will get lots of examples of these five-word verbs.

  8. Hi, mrthoth.

    I wanted to ask you if your future perfect continuous, i.e. your example of a five-verb sentence, is a legitimate sentence in American English. In British English, continuous is an impossible form with future perfect (at least according to the textbooks :-) ). Not that you can’t make it, you just don’t say it.

  9. Auxiliary verbs don’t help “more” than modal verbs; you use them or don’t use them according to what you want to say. “I would be running the show” and “I would run the show” can often be used interchangeably, but you would need the auxiliary if you wanted to stress the process of running the show.

  10. Thanks.
    I have a few more question I don’t see how Auxiliary verbs are hepling more than if you put run in place of them “I may be” “I may run” help!

  11. Yes, auxiliary verbs can appear without modals. For example, in “I am running the show,” “am” is an auxiliary. It is very, very common for auxiliaries to appear without modals (”I do care,” “I have forgotten,” etc. etc.).

  12. Can auxiliary verbs only help modal verbs?

  13. They’re called ‘modal AUXILIARY verbs’. Modals are not verbs… Sorry, I can’t use your video.

  14. The Illuminati aka blueblood scum like Rothschilds, Warburgs, Windsors, Al Gore, Al Pike, Putin etc rule Freemasonry. They’ll probably start WW3, force-vaccinate many in Fall, implement Codex Alimentarius and stage an alien invasion to get a fascist world government with us microchipped, so resist! Support Oracle Broadcasting, Dr. Deagle, David Icke & Project Camelot!

  15. Thanks for your question. “Is” does have an infinitive form: “to be.” The most irregular verb in English, “to be” is conjugated this way: I am, you are, he/she/it is, we are, they are. The “be” is more obvious in tenses that include the past participle, “been” (I have been, I had been) or the present participle, “being” (he is being, they were being, etc.).

  16. What’s the difference between modal verbs and copulative verbs? I mean IS does not have an infinitive form “to is” for example so how is that different to warrent a seperate catagory?

  17. past senses of can, may, will are could, might, would. when each is used as simply past sense, it is quite the same as it is used as a modal verb. reading an essay, someone’s reminiscences etc, s/he sometimes writes sentences with present forms and past forms thereof being mixed. that case, i feel tough to read.

  18. WE LOVE YOU MR THOTH

  19. Is “to fool” modal or model verb? Huchew… excuse me

    Very nicely patronizing,; not to mention educational

  20. This class hauls Ass compare to Supper Mario Bros for my old nintendo.
    the instructor and the board in this lecture room would make it a great practice target for my BB gun.

    Not a challenging moving targets

    three letter words this clas is a P.O.S, and you’ll have to pay me to take this class again

  21. smart. I was about to tell you “no” as “look across”, “look into”, “look over the hill” are not verbs. yes, they describe the verb “look” but are not the actual verb itself. But then “look up” means ’search’. as in ‘what did you look up?’
    in this case ‘look up’ is the main verb. one modal; three other auxiliaries; one main. six!

  22. that will help me a lot. Thanks

  23. No, It would not be a good idea because concerto is being played. If you were to turn it into active voice than it would sound clumsy. Concerto is playing? football maybe xD, but with whom? xD

  24. I *will have been being looking up* goiter in the dictionary.

    Could one argue that here we have six verbs in a row? Sure, “up” isn’t a verb by itself, but “to look up” is a phrasal verb.

  25. Great job and explanation. Do you know any American (not British) website where I can find English grammar? I really need it, thanks :)

Leave a Reply