Gramer Girl here. I'm in Yon Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today

we're going to talk about a fun Southern regionalism and the influence of Spanish on English.

Last week I was a guest on the Anne Fisher Show on WOSU to talk about regionalisms and

someone asked about a particular kind of phrase you hear in the south that uses something

called modal auxiliary verbs and I thought it would be fun to talk about them more here.

Today we'll start with the basics of modals and then talk about that interesting way they're

used in Southern American English. If you've listened to this podcast for a while you've

probably heard me talk about auxiliary verbs which also co-by the less fancy name of helping

verbs. English has only a few helping verbs and we can divide them into four groups. One group

consists of forms of the verb B. M-r is was were B, B-ing and Ben. Another consists of forms

of have, have, has, had, and having. A third category of helping verbs is forms of the verb

do, do, does, and did. The fourth group as you may have guessed consists of the modal auxiliary

verbs but before we talk about them I should note that B, do, and have aren't always

helping verbs. In the sentence squiggly is running a marathon, the verb is is a helping

verb but in the sentence squiggly is ardvarced second best friend it's a linking verb and

you can learn more about linking verbs in the old good versus well episode. In the sentence

ardvarced doesn't eat grits and has never wanted to. The verbs doesn't and has are helping

verbs but in the sentence ardvarced does crossword puzzles and has an amazing collection of

rubik's cubes. The verbs does and has are ordinary verbs or as linguists call them lexical

verbs. The most common ones are will, would, shall, should, can, could, may, might and must.

Modal auxiliary verbs are defective. Yes that's the actual term defective. It means they're

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