birdeen's call
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This is an offshoot of another thread (subjunctive or not). I might be a good idea to post it on diagramming sentences forum but I know nothing about diagramming sentences... :-(
I recently read somewhere (probably on this forum) that let in let's dance was an auxiliary verb. It was stated as if it were a scientific fact and I believed it was. But now I think it's exactly a case of using one's feelings (created by knowledge of etymology) to determine the word class a word belongs to. I will have to resort to my native language now. Let's take an example of an English third-person imperative sentence:
Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.
In Polish:
Niech ten, który jest bez grzechu, rzuci pierwszy kamień.
The pair of sentences have a very nice feature: they mean exactly the same and they employ exactly the same word order. (The Polish sentence is one word shorter, which is because there are no articles in Polish. "The" is omitted.)
Let and niech both introduce the imperative mood. Him and ten are both subjects. Cast and rzuci are both something I don't know the English term for, but their function is clear. The rest is not important.
Since let and niech have exactly the same functions it would be natural to demand that they be in the same word class I think. But I have never heard of anybody saying that niech is an auxiliary verb. And I think the different approaches of Polish and English grammarians to exactly the same thing might be caused by the different feelings they have about the words let and niech respectively. Let is mainly a verb in English which, I guess, makes English grammarians call it a verb in this context too. Niech has no other function than this, so nothing makes Polish grammarians feel it's a verb. (Even though its origin is verbal. It happened too long ago to influence our thinking.)
I think, if my interpretation is correct, this could prove that linguists do not base entirely on syntax and morphology. If that's how it should be or not is another matter, which I would love to hear from you about.
It's a verb to me. (See here. Scroll down to When the pronoun is the object of one verb and the object of another.)
Do you accept that "you" is the subject of this sentence then?
So here it is.That topic is worthy of its own thread. :up: