3.2. FURTHER INFLECTIONS 105
You may have noticed that in these two sentences only the last verb
in the sentence has an inflection indicating tense (present/past) andpolar-
ity(affirmative/negative). This is a consequence of using : while itself
is the classical helper verb for verb completion, its means there is
no indication in which way the action has been completed. To indicate the
particular completion, the last verb is placed in whichever form is required,
and this form then applies to all previous verbs in form. To illustrate:
”(I) read a book and listen to music.””(I) read a book and listened to music.”
(’read’ is past tense in this sentence)Verbal adjectives, too, can be chained in this way by using their
- :
adjective form
+
+
+
/ +
+This lets us write the previous ”book” sentence in the followingmanner, using the adjectives
, big,
, red and
, heavy.:
”This is a big, red, heavy book.”Just like with verbs, the actual inflection of the adjectives in is
determined by the final adjective. To illustrate, the following sentence is
entirely in past tense affirmative:
”(It) was a big, red, heavy box.”To make everything negative, we take the plain negative form of