I’ve noticed that some auxiliary verbs are not preceded by the gerund -te form of the first verb, and I’m wondering what the reason is for this, so that I am able to understand the grammatical mechanics better rather than relying on my poor memory as to which auxiliary verbs are like this, if that makes sense.
1 Like
This is a hard topic that I myself completely rely on experience rather than theory. All I can say is that whatever attaches to the first verb comes either after the て form or ます stem. For example for 行く it will be 行って and 行き respectively, and for 食べる 食べて and 食べ. Verb connected with て form retains the “and”, etc. meaning, which means that 持って行く is simply “to hold and go”. On the other hand verbs connected with ます stem create a new standalone verb that has a uniqe nuance or meaning, often not clear at the first glance (gets better with experience). Hope this helps a little bit, but I’m sure someone else will pitch in and help.
I just realized you meant specifically the so called auxiliary verbs that are taught as such? Everything I said applies to them too.
1 Like
People often use the word “conjugation” when referring to different “forms” such as ます・れる・られる・ない and etc, but in reality it isn’t conjugation at all, and these “forms” are what you call “auxiliary verbs” and generally attach to the verb stem. て is actually the closest thing to literal conjugation in Japanese, and it isn’t interacting with auxiliary verbs in the same way. It’s basically a linker, for example 〜ている・〜ていく・〜てあげる・〜ておく and etc. The て is just linking the previous verb to the next verb.
To add to what has already been said, the て form is not a gerund (it is not noun-like or a noun) but a conjunctive form so any aux verb after technically holds the implication of the verbs coming in order. However in practice many aux verbs which are also words in their own right (いる、ある、みる、etc) are so fossilised into their grammatical usage that I don’t think any native actively thinks about it in those terms. Consider the English sentences: “I had been to the shop” vs “I have been to the shop”. For a learner it may be helpful to agonise over the literal differences between “had” and “have” but native speakers don’t register the word as having some literal meaning beyond indicating tense. So it may be helpful to think of the て form as being literally conjunctive in these constructions but equally it isn’t necessary (and once you are comfortable with them you will probably find thinking that way is a hinderance and not a help).
The other very common form for taking aux verbs is the so called “ます form” (or continuative form) which has a lot of functions. To keep things simple (again talking about aux verbs that are also words in their own right), when a verb attaches to the stem of another verb then you can consider it a compound verb and the meaning is less grammatical and more to do with the word itself. I am talking about aux verbs like 出す、なおす、始める、etc here. You can create your own compounds with these but some are far far far more common than others so once you generally know what these mean in a compound then it is better to learn the compounds as individual words, in my opinion. With the て form this compounding doesn’t happen and the implicaiton is to do A and then do B.
In terms of aux verbs which are not words in their own right (ます、られる、etc), these will never be attached to the て form (as far as I know…) as they are bound; since coming after て implies some kind of independence (although, again, in most cases no one thinks about it that deeply) it wouldn’t “make sense”.
However there are 5 possible inflections besides て for each verb (ending in u, i, a, e, o for godan verbs) and although the “ます form” (ending in i for godan verbs) is the most common there is no rule I know of for why certain inflections are used other than quirks of history and euphonic reasons. Of course you can describe each inflection based on its most common function (this is contextual as the same inflection can have multiple functions - for example, is 食べる the dictionary form, plain form, terminal form, or attributive form?).
Having said all of this rubbish, you don’t need to memorise or even be aware of any of this. Reading and/or listening a lot will clear up the differences pretty easily over time.
3 Likes