1997: Defective Verbs pt. 3/4 (Modals) Mar 20, 2018

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To follow up on the previous two days about defective verbs, not only are words possibly defective if they conjugate to some but not all persons, but there are verbs that care defective for other reasons. Modal verbs like 'will' 'may' and 'can', lack the forms for infinitive (e.g. *'to may'), future aspect (*'I will might'), participle (*'maying'), imperative (*'would!'), and gerund (*"my maying is a skill"). This is in contrast to defective verbs like 'rain', because 'I rain' is not possible for semantic reasons, but given that the 'I would can' is not possible  but "I would be able to" is acceptable means that the issue is at least partly syntactic and not merely semantic. This is at least partly true of other non-modal verbs such as 'to be' which cannot be used in certain forms such as in this case the imperative 'be!'. If you know of any others, write a comment.
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