Verb. General Characteristics

Grammatical categories of Tense and Aspect.

Verb.

8.

General Characteristics.

The verb as a notional part of speech has the following features:

1. they express the meanings of dynamic process, or process developing in time, including not only actions as such (to work, to build), but also states, forms of existence (to be, to become, to lie), various types of attitude, feelings (to love, to appreciate), etc.;

2. they have the grammatical categories of person, number, tense, aspect, voice, mood, order and posteriority most of which have their own grammatical means;

3. the function of verbs entirely depends on their forms: if they in finite form they fulfill only one function – predicate. But if they are in non-finite form then they can fulfill any function in the sentence but predicate; they may be part of the predicate;

4. verbs can combine actually with all the parts of speech, though they do not combine with articles, with some pronouns. It is important to note that the combinability of verbs mostly depends on the syntactical function of verbs in speech;

5. verbs have their own stem-building elements:

postfixes: -fy (simplify, magnify, identify…)

-ize (realize, fertilize, standardize…)

-ate (activate, captivate…)

prefixes: re- (rewrite, restart, replant…)

mis- (misuse, misunderstand, misstate…)

un- (uncover, uncouple, uncrown…)

de- (depose, depress, derange…) and so on.

There is a peculiar means of rendering the meaning of the process, which occupies an intermediary position between the word and the word-combination: the so-called “ phrasal verbs ”, consisting of a verb and a postpositional element. Some phrasal verbs are closer to the word, because their meaning cannot be deduced from the meaning of the verb or the meaning of the postposition separately, e.g.: to give up, to give in, etc.; others are semantically closer to the word-combination, e.g.: to stand up, to sit down, etc. A separate group of phrasal verbs is made by combinations of broad meaning verbs to have, to give, to take and nouns, e.g.: to give a look, to have rest, to have a bite, etc.

Дата добавления: 2013-12-13