The Category of Aspect

The Future-in-the-Past Tense

The Past Tense

The Present Tense

As to its syntagmatic semantics, the Present is the richest tense form. Its paradigmatic meaning is that of immediate present coinciding with the moment of speech. It’s syntagmatic meanings are: habitual recurrent actions characterising a person (He hates authority); universal truths (usually in maxims)(The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything. O.Wilde); the biblical timeless present (One generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the Earth abideth forever…); f uturity (He returns from London tomorrow); a long stretch of time from the past into the future(I know him all my life); a past occurrence (the so called H istoric, Dramatic Present) (Yesterday she comes in, sits down, gasps and dies. A. Christie. Then he turned the corner and what do you think happens next?).

It seems to be semantically simpler as it merely refers to something that happened in the past. According to Otto Jespersen’s theory of the imaginative use of tenses, the Past or the before Past conveys, under certain conditions, hypothetical actions, unreality, impossibility (I wish you did it. I wish You had done it yesterday. He looks as if he had never been here). O.Espersen did not distinguish the Subjunctive Mood (neither Subjuncive I nor Subjunctive II).

There’s no agreement as to the place the forms should/would + infinitive occupy in the system of the English language. Often, these forms are placed outside the morphological categories. Prof. Smirnitsky finds them to be an expression of the Conditional mood. Prof. Ivanova put forward the idea of two temporal centres: the centre of the Present and that of the Past. The Future-in-the-Past is a dependent future belonging to the past. According to prof. Khaimovich should/would are the manifestations of the category of posteriority which is based on the oppositions shall: should, will: would. M.Y. Blokh distinguishes the category of prospective posteriority. He distinguishes two Futures: the Future-of-the-Present and the Future-of-the-Past. According to prof. Plotkin, the Future-in-the-Past is the 4 -th member of the tense paradigm in modern English.

Under aspect scholars understand a mode (a phase) of an action, that is, continuity, progressiveness, completion, resultativity, instantaneousness, etc.).

The following problems are open to discussion here:1. Some scholars don’t recognize the existence of this category in English. They hold that aspectual relations of completeness/ incompleteness, continuity, resultativity are expressed contextually by lexico-grammatical means. The continuous and perfect forms are treated as tenses. 2. Those who recognize it find it either a logical or a grammatical category. 3. Scholars who treat aspect as a logical category distinguish 5 aspects. T he ingressive aspect denotes the initial phase of an action (He went running. He started reading.). The durative aspect denotes a progressive action(He is eating). The terminative aspect represents an action as a finished whole (It hit the target). The effective aspect denotes the final point of an action (He has done it. He came running). The iterative aspect denotes repeated actions (He often gets sick. He would come here every day last month).Those who recognize aspect as a grammatical category distinguish either 3 aspects {the imperfect aspect (He was doing it);the perfect aspect(He has done it); the indefinite aspect(He did it)} or 2 aspects(thecommon and the continuous). 4. Debated is the paradigmatic meaning of the continuous form. It is interpreted as duration or limited duration ( Jespersen), simultaneity ( Vorontsova), continuity within certain time limits (Ilyish), development (Blokh). 5. The category of aspect penetrates other verbal categories. The categories of tense and aspect are blended, they are inseparable and should be treated jointly. This view was advanced by professors Vorontsova and Ivanova. According to professors Barkhudarov, Smirnitsky, Ilyish tense and aspect are two distinct categories, tense showing the time of an action and aspect showing the development of an action.

Professors Smirnitsky, Barkhudarov, Ilyish, Khlebnikova find aspect to be a grammatical category based on the binary privative opposition of two forms read::am reading,reads:: is reading, has read:: has been reading, etc., which represent the common aspect and the continuous aspect. M.Y. Blokh distinguished the aspectual category of development which is based on the opposition of the continuous and the noncontinuous forms. The distinction between the continuous and the noncontinuous forms can be neutralized (You are always complaining = you always complain). So, semantically, continuous forms are redundant. But, stylistically, they are of extreme importance, as they actively participate in the creation of sentential and textual emotiveness, expressiveness, intensiveness and evaluation (positive and negative).

The semantic content of continuous forms comes to be rather complex. We can distinguish in it the paradigmatic invariant seme of continuity and the syntagmatic semes of permanence, timelessness, futurity, emotiveness, intensiveness, expressiveness, evaluation.

There are some factors in modern English which occasion the frequent usage of continuous forms. Important are artistic considerations, as continuous forms are more emphatic than noncontinuous forms. There is psychological explanation of the growing usage of continuous forms. The British are becoming more impulsive, forgetting about their traditional reticence (suffice it to remember about the aggressiveness of British football fans). Continuous forms are more frequent in the speech of females. As a result of semantic disagreement between the non-dynamic meaning of the verb and the dynamic meaning of a continuous form a grammatical metaphor is being born which makes discourse more dynamic, emotive, evaluatory (I’m not listening, I’m not seeing, I’m not feeling. I’m falling in love with you again). In artistic texts authors most often impart dynamism to normally undynamic verbs (Now he was remembering everything.Is she still liking England? Loving it). Continuous forms participate in the creation of an ironic effect, which is based upon contrasts and contradictions (You are being very charitable today). A person, normally, cannot be charitable for a very limited period of time.

The Category of Time Relation (or Correlation)

The debated questions within the category of correlation are: 1.the existence of this category; 2. the character of this category; 3. the paradigmatic meaning of perfect forms; 4. the interrelations between correlation, tense and aspect.

There are several interpretations of the perfect form. 1. According to the tense view, the perfect is a peculiar tense form (H. Sweet, O. Jespersen, M. Ganshina, G. Curme, M. Bryant, Yu. Korsakov,). It is an anterior tense which coexists with the other primary expressions of time(Present, Past and Future) (I shall have done it by 5 o’clock). 2. According to the aspectview, the perfect is an aspect (Nestfield, West, Deutschbein). It is treated as the aspect of completion or the aspect of succession. 3.According to the tense-aspect blend view, the perfect is recognized as a form of double temporal- aspective character (I. P. Ivanova). 4. According to the time correlation view, the perfect form builds up its own category, different from tense and aspect. This is an independent category which is termed differently by different scholars { the category of time relation (A.I.Smirnitsky), the category of correlation (B.A.Ilyish), the category of order (B.Khaimovich), the category of retrospective coordination (M.Y. Bloch)}. Popular is the last interpretation. The category of correlation is based on the opposition of nonperfect and perfect forms(write:: have written, is writing:: has been writing). The paradigmatic meaning of a perfect form is that of precedence. This independent grammatical category of time relation(correlation) constitutes a whole system involving aspect, tense and mood(writes – has written – has been written, etc). Tense, aspect and correlation are closely connected. They, correspondingly, represent the time of an action, its development and its precedence to another action in the present, past or future.

The distinctions between the members of this opposition can be neutralized (I hear:: I have heard, I forget= I have forgotten).

A Perfect form, representing the category of correlation, is polysemantic. It has a semantic structure constituted by the paradigmatic meaning of precedence and variable syntagmatic meanings which can be revealed combining the contextual analysis with the componential method { resultativity, completeness, successiveness, an implication for thefuture, repeatedness, retrospective conclusion (People have talked like that from time immemorial. Don’t think it has been a happy marriage).

The meaning of the perfect depends on several factors. One of them is the meaning of the verb. Verbs can be durative and terminative. Durative verbs denote an action that goes on indefinitely (to go, to walk, to love, to dislike, to speak); terminative verbs denote an action reaching a limit (to come, to close, to bring, to lose to break).

Perfect forms can be encountered in all kinds of speech: vulgar and elevated, but they are most frequent in conversation. Perfect forms can emphasise the attitude of the speaker towards the people or events described (Since the time I left you, I have lived your life. I have breathed you, I haveeaten you, I have drunk you, I have wept your eyes. I. Murdoch).

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