Helping verbs

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 verb which is helping other verbs now we call this the helping verb you may have heard of called that or the auxiliary verb and 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 and 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 that I'm just going to 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 want to 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 Dave it out