Can someone help me distinguish between auxiliaries, modals and copula verbs please.
Also are shortenings considered morphological or lexical and why 
Sure - I can try.
Let me know if any of this doesn't make sense (and I'm happy to be corrected/challenged).
Perhaps the biggest distinction between verb types is that of
lexical verbs (so "main verbs" like
run,
eat,
love and so on) and
auxiliary verbs. Auxiliary verbs, unlike lexical verbs, provide no lexical content - so no meaning as such.
The auxiliary verb is like a "helper" to the main/lexical verb and, as such, occurs in conjunction with another verb. The auxiliary can provide (mostly grammatical) information, such as modality (essentially likelihood - we'll look at this soon), aspect (whether the verb is ongoing or not) and voice (whether it's active or passive). And there are two main types of auxiliary: the
primary auxiliary and the
modal auxiliary.
The primary auxiliary (for our purposes, just denoted by "auxiliary") provides important grammatical information. For example:
- I
was wondering about the class.
- He
has spoken for way too long.
- I
do like ice-cream!
I've highlighted the auxiliary in each. Clearly, in each situation, it's not the *main* verb of the sentence (that would be
wondering,
spoken and
like respectively). But without them, the sentences wouldn't really make sense.
- *I wondering about the class.
- *He spoken for way too long.
- *I like ice-cream!
The first two feel grammatically stripped; the third keeps its core meaning, but loses emphasis.
The other type of auxiliary is the
modal auxiliary (or for our purposes, the "modal verb"). One of the major functions of these is to denote the implied or actual degree of possibility, likelihood and so on. For example:
- That
could be a goer.
- I
will do it later.
- I'm going to a party tomorrow; it
should be terrible.
This time, I've highlighted the modals. They're again not the *main* verbs (
be,
do and
be respectively), but they indicate hesitancy, absoluteness and then likelihood (or similar).
Modal verbs have historically been paired based on tense (so can/could, may/might, shall/should and so on), but this is less the case these days. The only difference between
may and
might now, for example, is a slight change in hesitancy. For some speakers, there may (might) be no difference at all. And interestingly, there seem to be some new modals entering the language as we speak.
Copular verbs are different again, and IMO slightly more confusing. Basically, they grammatically connect a subject with a complement. For example:
- Brenden
is tall.
Here, without that
is, the sentence doesn't make much sense at all; it's a grammatical necessity. The same thing is true in something like "The cake tastes amazing", where
taste is acting as the copular.
Does that make sense?
EDIT: Whoops, sorry about the long post haha.
EDIT II: To respond to your other question, I think you could probably argue both (because the you're getting rid of morphemes, which is creating new lexemes). What are your thoughts?
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