- [Voiceover] Hello grammarians! Now, we've already talked about
how verbs can show actions and link concepts, and today
I'd like to talk about a third function of the verb, which
is helping other verbs. Now we call this the helping
verb, you may have heard it called that, or the auxiliary verb. These are just two words
for the same thing, auxiliary is just a more
Latin way to say helping, that's all it means. Now I've brought along an
image of my friend Brian to help explain this principle. What helping verbs are is
really just inflected forms of the verbs to have, and to be. And as we get deeper into
the verb, I'll explain what each one means in each
one of its different versions, but for now, suffice it to
say, I'm just gonna throw out some examples, just so
you can see what it means for a helping verb to be a helping verb. So the specific way in
which helping verbs help is that they establish certain
facts about a sentence, usually when they're happening in time. And we'll get more and
more into that as we get more into tenses and aspect,
but I just wanna give you some examples. So, here we have Brian is eating a pizza. Brian and I love pizza, we
used to eat a lot of pizza. Brian has eaten a pizza. Brian was eating a pizza. And, finally, Brian had
been eating a pizza. So the presence of all these helping verbs has different effects depending
on which ones you use. And, as I said, we'll
get into those later, but, just for a brief
overview, for example, let's see, Brian is eating
a pizza, that suggests that it's going on now. Brian has eaten a pizza,
that means he had done it, it's over, in the past. Brian was eating a pizza, which
means he was in the middle of eating a pizza when something happened. And, finally, Brian had
been eating a pizza. So he was doing it, and then
he stopped at some point in time. And this is just the
most basic introduction to helping verbs. So, verbs can show actions,
verbs can link concepts, verbs can help other verbs. You can learn anything. David out.