Verbs: types of classifications and categories of the verb: tense and aspect.

The Category of Tense

Sweet defined the category of tense as the “primary grammatical expression of distinctions of time”. Curm added to it that the tenses are different forms which a verb assumes to indicate the time of an action.

In a very generalized manner there are three tenses which coincide with the philosophical categories of time: past, present and future in relation to the moment of speech. So, grammatical tenses reflect the relation of the situation described in an utterance to the actual reality, that is the moment of speech. Yet, there are exceptions: I am seeing my dentist on Thursday (in the future).

Morphological forms:

1) Present: zero inflexion or the inflection “s”;

2) past: the suffix –ed/irregular suffixe/supplative forms (go, went, gone) ;

3) future: auxiliary shall/will + the infinitive.

Jespersen: no future (other ways of expression, modal shades in will and shall).

Ilyish: I’m afraid I will have to do it again (contraditction); What he says’ll have authority (the contracted form, no modality of volition).

Other ways of expressing that a process will take place in the future add certain shades of meaning, for example, a fixed plan.

The Category of Aspect

The discussion of the CoA is based on the binary opposition of usage or non-usage of the structure to be + Participle 1. This category reflects the duration of a process in time.

Some linguists (Kennedy and Curme) consider this a semantic category rather than a grammatical one. Kennedy singles out the following aspects:

1) terminative (he wrote a play – an action as a whole);

2) ingressive (she went about cleaning the sink – the beginning of an action);

3) effective (they ceased fighting – the end);

4) durative (he was walking about the park);

5) iterative (he would wake up at 6 am every morning).

Vendler was the scholar who worked out an aspectual classification of verbs:

1) states (know, smell);

2) activities (run, write);

3) achievements;

4) accomplishments.

Linguists who consider the aspect forms belonging to the category of tense: Sweet, Jespersen, etc.

Others (Ivanova, Smirmitsky, Ilyish) recognise aspect as a separate category. In the opposition of the common and the continuous aspects the former one will stand for a fact whereas the latter one will express the progress of an action.

The category of aspect expresses the way in which the action is shown to proceed.

The opposition of the common and continuous aspects is not inherent in all the verbs. There are some groups of verbs which either lack this category at all or have different semantic meanings in the two cases:

1) the verbs presenting various relations as actions (to contain, to consist, to possess, to resemble);

2) the verbs of physical and mental perception (to see, to know, to suppose, etc.);

3) certain link-verbs (to seem, to appear, to look, to turn out, to prove);

4) point-action verbs, whose denotates are very short in duration (to explode, to go off, to drop, to burst, etc.).