Category of Tense & Aspect of the verb

The material world exists in time and space and these 2 most important notions are reflected in human thinking and through it in the language.

Ontological time is reflected in language through the speakers presentation. That’s why they say that time of an action in language is represented subjectively through the speaker’s perception. That’s why in language there is strict correlation between the time of action and the moment of speech. The idea of time and language can be expressed in numerous ways: by morphemes (pre-war Russia); words of various classes (now, then, last time, before, after); grammatically (with the help of verbal tense).Ontological time is a one-dimensional time. It can be represented as a linear axes.

On this axes there is chosen the point—“ the moment of speech”. The actions which coincide with the moment of speech belong to the sphere of Present Tenses. The actions which are prior to the moment of speech belong to the Past Tenses. The actions which follow the moment of speech—The Future Tenses.

The grammatical term for naming the forms with temporal meaning is called—“The Tense”.

In every sentence there is its own temporal centre which can be expressed lexically with the help of special adverbial modifiers (E.g. I’m talking to you now. I’ll come tomorrow). Or it can be expressed grammatically through the verbal form itself. (E.g. I study at the university. I have finished my job). In some tense forms the grammatical way of expressing the temporal centre is enough and there is no special need to use adverbial modifier necessarily (E.g. I’ll come and help you. I read a lot. I did it. I have done it. I’m talking to my friend).

Such tenses which can express the temporal centre of the sentence by themselves are called PRIMARY SENTENCES (or contextually-free tenses). They are Present, Past, Future Simple, Present Continues (progressive) and Present Perfect. All the other tenses are called SECONDARY (or contextually-bound tenses) which means that in addition to the verbal tense they all need special adverbial modifiers of time which can be expressed by a single word or a clause of time.

In a complex sentence there appears a problem of sequence of tenses which means that if in the principal clause one of the past tenses is used, it should be followed by a past tense form in a subordinate clause too. For the purposes of sequence of tenses in English the form of the Future-in-the-past was developed deliberately by English grammarians. Still there are some cases when the strict rules of the sequence of tenses are not observed so severely: 1) if in the subordinate clause the idea of the universal truth is expressed (E.g. He knew that the Earth is one of the planets of the Heliocentric system), 2) or if the information of the subordinate clause is not limited by a certain temporal frame (E.g. He said his name is John).

The category of aspect

Every action is characterised not only by the time of its occurrence but also by the manner of its performance. The grammatical category describing the manner of the action is called the aspect. The aspect shows whether the action is represented as process, result, whether it was in duration for a certain period of time. In E-sh aspect is inseparately connected with the tense form. The aspect auxiliary indicates not only the manner of the action but the time too. That’s why tense & aspect in E-sh are called conjugated categories.

Traditionally there are distinguished 4 aspects: 1)the Perfect aspect presents an action in the form of the result achieved by a certain moment in the Present, Past or Future. 2)The Continuous or Progressive aspect presents an action in the process of its performance at a certain moment in the Present, Past or Future. Some verbs however are not used in this aspect—verbs of perception (to see, to hear), verbs of mental activity (to know, to believe, to recognise, to suppose), verbs denoting volition (to want, to desire, to wish), verbs denoting abstract relations (to have, to be, to belong, to depend, to consist). 3) the Perfect Continuous or Perfect Progressive aspect. It describes the period of duration of an action which is indicated either by an adverbial modifier (for 2 hours, since) or by a temporal clause (since I came here). 4)the Indefinite or the Simple aspect. It’s very difficult to characterise the manner of the action in this case because unlike in the 3 aspects above mentioned there is no special auxiliary describing the manner of this action in this case. Some scholars say that the Indefinite aspect has the zero meaning of the aspect because it only indicates the time of an action. For this reason this aspect is called Indefinite & E-sh scholars call this group Simple Tenses which have the meaning of time but no aspect meaning.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 1002