“How many auxiliary verbs has Kiswahili Bantu?”

Abstract

The exact number of auxiliary verbs in Kiswahili Bantu grammar is unknown. This state of affairs is strange, given the fact that many researchers today have the opportunity and resources to do a more thorough job of isolating auxiliary verbs in the grammar than the pioneers had time and resources to do. Existing databases are not yet able to determine how many auxiliary verbs there are in Kiswahili Bantu. This is because they have been programmed to retrieve only the set of auxiliary verbs recognized in traditional grammar books. Ironically, the traditional grammatical works stand in need of urgent revisions and updates. Traditional grammatical works based and still base most of their auxiliary verbs on those patterns that appear closely related to auxiliary verbs in the languages of the pioneers. These languages are, first and foremost, Indo-European languages. The result of their efforts is selective because several patterns that would otherwise qualify as auxiliary verbs by a definition based on Kiswahili Bantu internal evidence are discarded because they did or do not pass the translation equivalent construction (TEC) test in the grammar of the language of description, e.g. English, French, Portuguese, and German, to name just a few. This study attempts to track down as many predicate verbs as possible that qualify or could qualify as auxiliary verbs in Kiswahili Bantu, but have been left out or discarded in the received and standard mainstream of description of auxiliary verbs that have come down to us from the 'colonial' grammatical enterprise (CGE).