The Category of Tense

The General Properties of a Verb

The Verb

Verbs express events, processes, states, actions, activities, performances and achievements. It is an open class of words. Any word can be verbalized. Morphologically, syntactically and semantically it is a heterogeneous class of words, the most developed one, with the largest paradigm. The verb is a macrosystem of categories (person. number, aspect, tense, correlation, voice, mood) which are microsystems. Each category is based on the opposition of forms, these oppositions being binary and ternary; privative and equipollent (read::reads; read::have read; read::is read; read::is reading, went::goes::shall go, etc.).

The verb can be described in terms of the field theory. It has a field-like structure with a nucleus and a periphery. Its nucleus carries the actional, processive and statal verbs with a full-fledged, developed paradigm, verbs with complete predication, notional verbs with a full nominative value. We see here transitives, intransitives, semantically dual verbs, functioning both as transitives and intransitives (fly, wear, close, develop, eat, wash, etc.). The periphery is composed of semi-notionals with a partial nominative value. These are the verbs with a defective paradigm and an incomplete predication (link-verbs: be, seem, appear, happen, get, grow; modal verbs: must, may, can, should, will; modal equivalents: be to, have to, have got to, etc., auxiliaries: do, have, shall, should, will, would, get, go: Everything has been going just great. The house got burnt); verbs with the relational semantics (include, belong, refer, resemble); verbs with phrasal semantics (begin, stop, continue, come, go, get, stand: He went running, He came running, He got going), substitutes replacing notionals (Do you want to go? Yes, I do). All these verbs have no nominative value, they can’t predicate by themselves.

We find among verbs those with post-positions (to put off, to get off, etc.). Notional verbs are apt to be easily functionalized (I have come to understand you at last), which shows English to be an analytical language. Some verbs are used to impart dynamics to a sentence (Try and do it! I can’t go and shoot him!). As compared with Russian, English is twice or thrice as verbal.

Tense is a grammatical expression of objective distinctions of time into the past, present and future. The existence of this category is undebated in all Indo-European languages, but within the category there are some debated problems:1.the number of tenses; 2.the existence of the Future Tense; 3. the syntagmatic meanings of the past tenses; 4.the nature of the Future-in- the Past.

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