Is the 'auxiliary be' an auxiliary?

[awer]

I read in a wiki article: "if Homer were living and an Englishman".

In the phrase 'were living' 'were' is an auxiliary and then it's reinterpreted as a main verb in 'were an Englishman'?

I understand the action in the first phrase is living but it's more like from the semantic point of view, not the grammatical one. Compare it to "if he were black", it's exactly the same grammar, 'black' is an adjective, 'living' is a participle or a verbal adjective. is it one of those things you have to accept as fact?

it's also not the same as a true auxiliary like 'have' which can't be analysed the same way as the 'aux. be'. Compare: "i have made a mistake and [have] a problem now".

[Salmoneus]

'Be' is called a 'copula'.

[linguoboy]

I understand the action in the first phrase is living but it's more like from the semantic point of view, not the grammatical one. Compare it to "if he were black", it's exactly the same grammar, 'black' is an adjective, 'living' is a participle or a verbal adjective. is it one of those things you have to accept as fact?

In this case, I interpret the construction as copula + predicate adjective rather than auxiliary + non-finite verb. You could replace "living" with "alive" without substantially changing the meaning.

Cf. ?"if Homer were living the high life and an Englishman". Is that grammatical for you?

[Salmoneus]

I understand the action in the first phrase is living but it's more like from the semantic point of view, not the grammatical one. Compare it to "if he were black", it's exactly the same grammar, 'black' is an adjective, 'living' is a participle or a verbal adjective. is it one of those things you have to accept as fact?

In this case, I interpret the construction as copula + predicate adjective rather than auxiliary + non-finite verb. You could replace "living" with "alive" without substantially changing the meaning.

Cf. ?"if Homer were living the high life and an Englishman". Is that grammatical for you?

It is for me, although it's more obviously so if you put it the other way around: "If Homer were an Englishman and living the high life"

[hwhatting]

The functions "copula" and "auxiliary" do not necessarily exlude each other. The difference to "have" is simply that the constructions with "be" are still very close to its original meaning as copula, while the perfect construction has moved away from the original meaning of have ("I have bought a book" meant originally "I have (hold, own) a bought (by me) book = a book that I bought", but the perfect doesn't have any implication of ownership or possession any more. That is why in some Englishes "have" in the meaning "hold, own, possess" has been replaced by "have got". So "have" in its auxiliary and non-auxiliary uses has different semantic scopes, while the scopes of "be" in its use as copula and auxiliary are still similar.

[Dewrad]

I understand the action in the first phrase is living but it's more like from the semantic point of view, not the grammatical one. Compare it to "if he were black", it's exactly the same grammar, 'black' is an adjective, 'living' is a participle or a verbal adjective. is it one of those things you have to accept as fact?

In this case, I interpret the construction as copula + predicate adjective rather than auxiliary + non-finite verb. You could replace "living" with "alive" without substantially changing the meaning.

Cf. ?"if Homer were living the high life and an Englishman". Is that grammatical for you?

It is for me, although it's more obviously so if you put it the other way around: "If Homer were an Englishman and living the high life"

It is for me, although again I would argue that it's essentially the same construction as found in OP: a predicate adjective, just in this case an adjective taking an object.

If we swap it around with another auxiliary, such as *if Homer had written the Iliad and ten quid, the verb had cannot be interpreted here as a lexical verb of possession.

[KathTheDragon]

I understand the action in the first phrase is living but it's more like from the semantic point of view, not the grammatical one. Compare it to "if he were black", it's exactly the same grammar, 'black' is an adjective, 'living' is a participle or a verbal adjective. is it one of those things you have to accept as fact?

In this case, I interpret the construction as copula + predicate adjective rather than auxiliary + non-finite verb. You could replace "living" with "alive" without substantially changing the meaning.

Cf. ?"if Homer were living the high life and an Englishman". Is that grammatical for you?

It is for me, although it's more obviously so if you put it the other way around: "If Homer were an Englishman and living the high life"

It is for me, although again I would argue that it's essentially the same construction as found in OP: a predicate adjective, just in this case an adjective taking an object.

If we swap it around with another auxiliary, such as *if Homer had written the Iliad and ten quid, the verb had cannot be interpreted here as a lexical verb of possession.

Nor does it work the other way round: *if Homer had ten quid and written the Iliad.

[zompist]

Simple adjectives don't combine so well with the progressive, but for me it's greatly dependent on order:

*Homer is writing an account of the war and blind.
*Homer is writing an account of the war and Athenian.
Homer is blind and writing an account of the war.
?Homer is Athenian and writing an account of the war.

[Salmoneus]

Simple adjectives don't combine so well with the progressive, but for me it's greatly dependent on order:

*Homer is writing an account of the war and blind.
*Homer is writing an account of the war and Athenian.
Homer is blind and writing an account of the war.
?Homer is Athenian and writing an account of the war.

All four completely unobjectionable to me.
Indeed, I can't even imagine what problem you might find with the last one! Is it limited to 'Athenian', or does it apply to all nationalities?

[gmalivuk]

This strikes me as similar to the second type of zeugma WIkipedia lists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeugma#Type_2

There it points out that when the initial verb has a different sense for each noun after it, the most prototypical or literal one usually comes first. I wonder if something similar is happening in zompist's sentences, where we interpret be+adjective as more prototypical than progressive be+participle.

Though now that I think about it, the problem with the first two sentences lies more in the potential for syntactic ambiguity than anything else. Is he writing an account and writing blind? Is he writing an account of the war and an account of blind? Of course neither of those readings is grammatical, but I read enough L2 English to expect someone used "blind" in place of "blindness" just as readily as I'd expect they intended "is" to be the word that acted across the "and".

The second sentence lends itself even more easily to my learner-mistake reading, because "Athenian" could easily be what someone wrote instead of either of two grammatically correct options: "an Athenian" or "Athenians".

If we dropped the rest of the verb hrase, though, both "Homer is writing and blind" and "Homer is writing and Athenian" sound fairly okay to me.