THE ENGLISH EXPANDED TENSES

In the survey just given we found two renderings of Lat. scribebam in English, wrote for the habitual action, and was writing for the descriptive imperfect. Corresponding expressions are found in the present, etc., as English possesses a whole set of composite tense-forms: is writing, was writing, has been writing, will (shall) be writing, will (shall) have been writing, would (should) be writing, would (should) have been writing, and in the passive is being written, was being written [...]. Very much has been written by grammarians about these combinations, which have been called by various names, definite tenses, progressive tenses, continuous tenses. I prefer to call them expanded tenses, because this name is sufficiently descriptive of the formation without prejudging anything with regard to its employment. [...]

The purport of the expanded tenses is not to express duration in itself, but relative duration, compared with the shorter time occupied by some other action. «Methuselah lived to be more than nine hundred years old» – here we have the unexpanded lived indicating a very long time. «He was raising his hand to strike her, when he stopped short» – an action of very short duration expressed by means of the expanded tense. We may represent the relatively long duration by means of a line, in which a point shows the shorter time, either the present moment (which need not always be indicated) or some time in the past, which in most cases has to be specially indicated:

he is writinghe was writing

(now) when I entered

H.Sweet, A New English Grammar, Part I, p. 112–113, 138.

Voice

311.By voice we mean different grammatical ways of expressing the relation between a transitive verb and its subject and object. The two chief voices are the active (he saw) and the passive (he was seen).

312.In English the passive is formed by combining the finite forms of the auxiliary verb to be with the preterite participle of the verb. Thus the active forms I see, I saw, I have seen, I shall see become in the passive I am seen, I was seen, I have been seen, I shall be seen.

313.In a sentence with a fully expressed transitive verb, such as the dog killed the rat, although there is only one subject, namely, dog, yet from a logical point of view the statement about killing applies to the object-word rat as well as to the subject-word dog; and it may happen that we wish to state the killing rather with reference to the rat than the dog. It may also happen that all we know is that the rat was killed, without knowing how it was killed. In short, we may wish to make the object-word rat into the subject-word of the sentence. This we do by changing the active form killed into the corresponding passive form was killed: the rat was killed. The original subject is added, if necessary, by means of the preposition by: the rat was killed by the dog. In this sentence rat is the inverted object and by the dog is the inverted subject. The passive voice is, therefore, a grammatical device for (a) bringing the object of a transitive verb into prominence by making it the subject of the sentence and (b) getting rid of the necessity of naming the subject of a transitive verb.

315.But when such a sentence as the examiner asked me three questions is made passive, either of the object-words may be the subject of the passive sentence: I was asked three questions by the examiner; three questions were asked by the examiner. [...] We call me and questions in such constructions retained objects, distinguishing them, if necessary, as retained indirect and retained direct objects respectively.

316.Some languages, such as Greek, have a reflexive, or middle voice. [...]

395.In English [...] group-verbs can be put in the passive voice in imitation of the transitive verbs which they resemble in meaning, as in it has been thought of, he shall be attended to.

396.In such group-verbs the preposition follows the verb so closely that it is often completely detached from the noun-word it originally governed. When a preposition is used in this way we call it a detached preposition. [...]

H.Sweet, A New English Grammar, Part I, p. 105–112.

Mood

293.By the moods of a verb we understand grammatical forms expressing different relations between subject and predicate. Thus, if a language has special forms to express commands as distinguished from statements, we include the forms that express command under the term ‘imperative mood.’ Thus in English come! is in the imperative mood, while the statement he comes is in the ‘indicative’ mood. [...]

294.From the point of view of mood-distinctions statements fall under two main divisions, according as they state something as a fact or only as a thought. Thus it is true, it is not true, I think so, are all meant to imply statement of facts as opposed to mere thoughts. Whether such statements are really true – really statements of facts – is no concern of grammar, which deals only with the meaning of the form itself. From a grammatical point of view, moreover, doubtful statements, such as perhaps it is true, are just as much statements of fact as the most positive assertions.

295. There are various ways of stating in the form of a thought as opposed to a fact. The most unmistakable one is by stating in the form of a hypothesis, as when the fact-statements it is true, it is not true, are made into the hypothetical clauses if it is true, if it is not true. Here both pairs of sentences offer us a subject and a predicate standing to one another in the opposite relations of affirmation and negation, but while the first two sentences express the affirmation and negation as facts, the last two merely suggest them as objects of thought. [...]

299.In English the only inflectional moods are the indicative and subjunctive. But the inflections of the English verb are so scanty that we need not be surprised to find that the distinction between indicative and subjunctive is very slight. The only regular inflection by which the subjunctive is distinguished from the indicative in English is that of the third person singular present, which drops the s of the indicative (he sees) in the subjunctive (he see). In the verb to be, however, further distinctions are made: indicative I am, he is, he was, subjunctive I be, he be, he were, although in the spoken language the only distinction that is still kept up is that between was and were. Consequently the sense of the distinction in function between subjunctive and indicative has almost died out in English, and we use the subjunctive were only in combination with other mood-forms, the other subjunctive inflections surviving only in a few special phrases and constructions, such as God save the queen!, where the subjunctive expresses wish, being thus equivalent to the Greek optative.

300.The few distinctions that English makes between fact-statements and thought-statements are mainly expressed, not by inflections, but by auxiliaries (periphrastic moods), and by peculiar uses of tense-distinctions. The following are the auxiliary forms:

(a) The combination of should and would with the infinitive (should see, would see), when used in the principal clause of conditional sentences, is called the conditional mood. The conditional mood has the same form as the future preterite tense. .

(b) The combination of may and its preterite might with the infinitive (may see, might see) is called the permissive mood, as in may you be happy! where it expresses wish, lei the dog. loose that he may run about a little; we let the dog loose that he might run about a little, where it expresses purpose.

(c) The combination of the finite forms of the verb to be with the supine (is to see, was to see, were to see) is called the compulsive mood. This combination is so called because it primarily expresses compulsion or obligation, as in what am I to do?, what is to be done? In this sense it can hardly be considered a mood. But it is used as a pure mood in conditional sentences, as in if it were to rain, I do not know what we shall do.

301. We use tenses to express thought-statements in the hypothetical clauses of conditional sentences, as in if I knew his address I would write to him; if it were possible I would do it. In the latter example (as also in if it were to rain, § 300) the hypothesis is shown not only by the preterite tense, but also by the subjunctive inflection, which is really superfluous. When a thought-statement is expressed by a tense in this way, we call it a tense-mood. Were in if it were is a subjunctive tense-mood.

301.As we see, in some conditional sentences all three ways of expressing thought-statements are used – inflectional mood (subjunctive), auxiliary mood (conditional), and tense-mood (preterite). For convenience we will include all these methods of expression under the term thought-form. We understand, then, by thought-form any grammatical form meant to show that a statement is of a thought as opposed to a fact.

O.Jespersen, The Philosophy of Grammar, p. 313, 315.

Moods

Many grammarians enumerate the following moods in English, etc.: indicative, subjunctive, imperative, infinitive, and participle. It is, however, evident, that infinitives and participles cannot be coordinated with the others [...], and we shall therefore in this chapter deal with the first three moods only. These are sometimes called fact-mood, thought-mood, and will-mood respectively. But they do not «express different relations between subject and predicate», as Sweet says. It is much more correct to say that they express certain attitudes of the mind of the speaker towards the contents of the sentence [...]. Further it is very important to remember that we speak of «mood» only if this attitude of mind is shown in the form of the verb: mood thus is a syntactic, not a notional category. [...]

If we pass on to the Indicative and the Subjunctive, the first remark that obtrudes itself is that the treatment of this subject has been needlessly complicated by those writers who speak of combinations with auxiliary verbs, e. g. may he come | he may come | if he should come, as if they were subjunctives of the verb come, or subjunctive equivalents. Scholars would hardly have used these expressions if they had had only the English language to deal with, for it is merely the fact that such combinations in some cases serve to trans-rate simple Subjunctives in German or Latin that suggest the use of such terms, exactly as people will call to the boy a dative case. [...]

O. Jespersen, A Modern English Grammar, Part IV, vol. 3, p. 112–113.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 749