Grammatical Category of Aspect

Tense

Grammatical categories of verbs

B.A. Ilyish identifies six grammatical categories in present-day English verb: tense, aspect, mood, voice, person and number. L. Barkhudarov, D. Steling distinguish only the following grammatical categories: voice, order, aspect, and mood. Further they note, that the finite forms of the verb have special means expressing person, number and tense. So, in this question we do not find a generally accepted view-point.

The category of tense (Lat. tempus) expresses the relationship between the time of the action, event or state of affairs referred to in the sentence and the time of speaking. It reflects the objective category of time.

When speaking of the expression of time by the verb, it is necessary to strictly distinguish between the general notion of time, the lexical denotation of time, and the grammatical time proper, or grammatical temporality.

Lexical denotation of time All the lexical expressions of time are divided into "present-oriented", or "absolutive" expressions of time, and "non-present-oriented", "non-absolutive" expressions of time.
Absolutive The absolutive time denotation distributes the intellec­tive perception of time among three spheres: the sphere of the present, with the present moment included; the sphere of the past, which precedes the sphere of the present by way of retrospect; the sphere of the future, which follows the sphere of the present by way of prospect.	Non-absolutive The non-absolutive time denotation does not character­ise an event in terms of orientation towards the present. This kind of denotation may be either "relative" or "factual".
The sphere of present e.g. now	The sphere of past e.g. last month	The sphere of future e.g. tomorrow	Relative The relative expression of time correlates two or more events showing some of them either as preceding the others, or following the others, or happening at one and the same time with them. e.g. before that, after that	Factual The factual expression of time either directly states the astronomical time of an event, or else conveys this meaning in terms of historical landmarks. e.g. in 1991, during the Second World War

The category of tense (grammatical tense proper) finds different interpretations with different scholars. In traditional linguistics grammatical time is often represented as a three-form category consisting of the "linear" past, present, and future forms.

According to the conception of Henry Sweet there are three tenses in English. "Tense is primarily the grammatical expression of distinctions of time". Every occurrence, considered from the point of view of time, must be either past (I was here yesterday), present (he is here today), or future (he will be here tomorrow).

Some doubts have been expressed about the existence of a future tense in English. O.Jespersen discussed this question more than once (O.Jespersen. The Philosophy of Grammar.) The reason, why Jespersen denied the existence of a future tense in English was that the English future is expressed by the phrase "shall/will+infinitive" and the verbs "shall and will" which make part of the phrase preserve, according to Jespersen, some of their original meaning (shall are element of obligation and will are element of volition). In Jespersen's view, English has no way of expressing "pure futurity" free from modal shades of meaning that is it has no form standing on the same grammatical level as the forms of the past and present tenses.

However, this reasoning is not convincing. This is especially clear in the sentences where the verb "will" is used as an auxiliary of the future tense and where at the same time, the meaning of volition is excluded by the context. E.g. I am so sorry, I am afraid I will have to go back to the hotel. The verb "will" cannot be said to preserve even the slightest shade of the meaning of volition here. It can have only one meaning-that of grammatical futurity.

So the three main divisions of time are represented in the English verbal system by the three tenses. Each of them may appear in the common and in the continuous aspect. Thus we get six tense-aspect forms.

The future-in-the-past does not find its place in the scheme based on the linear principle. It’s a deviation from this straight line: its starting point is not the present, from which the past and the future are reckoned, but the past itself. Hence, this system is considered to be deficient, not covering all lingual data.

A different view of the English tense system has been put forward by Prof. N. Irtenyeva. According to this view, the system is divided into two halves: that of tenses centring in the present, and that of tenses centring in the past. The former would comprise the present, present perfect, future, present continuous, and present perfect continuous, whereas the latter would comprise the past, past perfect, future-in-the-past, past continuous, and past perfect continuous. The latter half is characterised by specific features: the root vowel (e.g. sang as against sing), and the suffix -d (or -t), e.g. looked, had sung, would sing, had been singing. This view has much to recommend it. It has the advantage of reducing the usual threefold division of tenses (past, present, and future) to a twofold division (past and present) with each of the two future tenses (future and future-in-the-past) included into the past or the present system, respectively. However, the cancellation of the future as a tense in its own right would seem to require a more detailed justification.

Another theory of English tenses has been put forward by A. Korsakov. He establishes a system of absolute and anterior tenses, and of static and dynamic tenses. By dynamic tenses he means what we call tenses of the continuous aspect, and by anterior tenses what we call tenses of the perfect correlation. It is the author's great merit to have collected numerous examples, including such as do not well fit into formulas generally found in grammars. The evaluation of this system in its relation to other views has yet to be worked out.

Linguists build up new systems of tenses in order to find a suitable place in them for future-in-the past. They express the idea that in English there exist two tense categories.

Tense
The category of primary time The first category - the category of primary time-expresses a direct retrospective evaluation of the time of the process denoted, due to which the process receives an absolutive time characteristic. This category is based upon the opposition of "the past tense" and "the present tense", the present moment being the main temporal plane of verbal actions.	The category of prospective time The second tense category is the category of "pro­spective time". It is based upon the opposition of "after-action" and "non-after-action". The category of Prospect is relative by nature. It characterizes the action from the point of view of its correlation with some other action. As the future verbal form may be relative either to the pre­sent time, or to the past time included in non-future, the English verb acquires two different future forms: the fu­ture of the present and the future of the past.
Past	Non-past (present)	Future	Non-future

Aspect is a verbal grammatical category showing the way in which the action develops. The modern English aspect based on the contrast of continuous and non-continuous forms begins to take root in the Middle English period. The continuous aspect goes back to the Old English free phrase beonjwesan + Participle Г.

The problem of aspect in Modern English admits of four interpreta­tions:

1) aspect is a semantic category;

2) there is no category of aspect in Modern English;

3) the category of aspect is closely connected with the category of tense
and cannot be severed from it;

4) the category of aspect is a specific grammatical category.

1) The semantic classification of aspects in English is carried out by G. Curme who finds it possible to single out five aspects:

-the durative aspect representing the action as continuing, e.g.: Mother is baking a cake now (V. Evans);

-the ingressive aspect directing the attention to the initial stage of the action or state, e.g.: She began crying (A. S. Hornby, A. P. Cowie, A. C. Gimson);

-the effective aspect directing the attention to the final point of the activity or state, e.g.: We stopped talking (ibid);

- the terminative aspect indicating an action as a whole, e.g.: She read about the murder in the paper (Longman Dictionary of Con­temporary English);

-the iterative aspect naming a succession of like acts, e.g.: When we were children, we would go skating every week (M. Swan). He pooh-poohs of everything (G. Curme).

The grammatical category of aspect, like any grammatical category, should have constant grammatical forms of its expression. In G. Curme's classification, it is only the durative and the terminative aspects that can be looked upon as grammatical aspects since to express the durative as­pect we usually employ the ///g-form, and the terminative aspect is gen­erally associated with the base of the verb. As for the so-called iterative, ingressive, and effective aspects, they cannot be referred to the grammati­cal category of aspect because they lack constant grammatical forms of their expression.

2. H. Sweet and O.Jespersen deny the existence of the category of as­pect altogether. They look upon continuous forms as tense forms. If it were so, continuous forms would represent a unity of two tenses: present and continuous in present continuous, past and continuous in past con­tinuous, future and continuous in future continuous. But we know that no grammatical form exists that could combine in itself two meanings of the same grammatical category.

3. V.N. Zhigadlo, I.P. Ivanova, L.L. Iofik and some other linguists think that the category of aspect forms an inseparable whole with the category of tense. The majority of linguists, however, are of opinion that although the grammatical categories of aspect and tense are interrelated, they can and should be separated for linguistic analysis because they characterize the verbal action from different angles: tense refers the action to this or that time sphere, aspect describes the manner in which the action de­velops in this time sphere.

4. The majority of linguists speak of two aspects in Modern English: continuous and nоn-continuous (or common). The continu­ous aspect is marked both in form {'be + Participle I) and in meaning (it represents an action in its development). The non-continuous aspect is unmarked both in form (no characteristic pattern 'be + Participle I) and in meaning (it represents an action as simply occurring with no ref­erence to its duration).

As is well known, not every verb is commonly used in the form "be+ Participle I". Verbs denoting abstract relations such as "belong" and the verbs denoting sense of perception or emotion such as "see, hear, hope, love", seldom appear in the form.

Thus, the verbs "see, hope, like, fear" and others, denoting perception or feelings (emotions) may be found in this form. E.g. It was as if she were seeing herself for the first time in a year. The form "be+ Participle I" is very appropriate here as it does not admit of the action being interpreted as momentaneous and makes it absolutely clear that what is meant is a sense perception going on for some time.

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