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CHAPTER 3. THE VERB AND ITS GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES 4 page

The Conditional mood is built with the help of the auxiliary verbs should/would and the Infinitive of the notional verb. As in the case of Subjunctive II, the non-perfect and perfect forms of the Infinitive have a temporal meaning rather than the meaning of priority. The Conditional mood expresses an unreal action which is the consequence of an unreal condition. Therefore it is usually used in the principal clause of a complex sentence with the subordinate clause of unreal condition or concession which has the predicate' in the form of Subjunctive II, e.g. If she could have been compressed to about three quarters of her real width, she would have been very attractive (K. Amis). The Conditional mood also occurs in the structure of simple sentences with implied condition, e.g. // would be a mistake to do so.

Occasionally the Conditional and Subjunctive II are used to express a tentative request or advice. E.g. "If I were you ", says Paul, " I'd tell you to get the next boat to St Antoine and get the next plane out to Barbados and get the hell back home" (M.Atwood). The conversation takes place on one of the islands in the Caribbean between a Canadian journalist and a local man. Shifting himself from the real into the possible world the man gives the lady very tentative advice to leave the place as staying there becomes dangerous because of a possible coup. A few lines later he repeats his advice putting it more bluntly in the form of the Imperative Mood: "Take the plane, lady" (idem.)

The other two moods - Subjunctive I and the Suppositional mood are different in form but very similar in meaning and contexts of use. The forms of Subjunctive I are homonymous to the forms of the Infinitive without the particle to . The Suppositional mood is built with the help of the auxiliary should. Both are used to express an action which the speaker presents as hypothetical, possible, desirable etc. Both are used in the same type of clauses: subject clauses of the it's necessary (desirable, possible etc.) type (It's necessary that we go (should go) there); object clauses after the verbs suggest, propose, demand, fear (I suggest that we do (should do) it immediately); adverbial clauses of purpose, concession and condition (Whatever the reason be (should be) the fact remains). The only difference between these two moods is their use in the simple sentence where only Subjunctive I is used, e.g. Long live friendship and peace!

A question arises: if these two moods appear to be doublets, why do they coexist in the language? The difference between them appears to be regional -the forms of the Suppositional moods are common in the British variant of the English language whereas Subjunctive I is used in the American, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand variants of English. In the American variant of the English language the construction "I suggest that we do it" is quite common whereas the construction with should is felt to be 'bookish' or 'British' [Jacobsson 1975, 222]. This regional differentiation is the result of the historical development of the English language. The forms of Subjunctive I were commonly used on the British Isles - the language of W.Shakespeare is rich in the use of these forms ( e.g. "Shall I send my daughter Kate to you:" "I prey you do" (The Taming of the Shrew"), but later gave way to the Suppositional mood in accordance with the general tendency of the English language towards the use of analytical forms. Now the forms of Subjunctive I are considered in British English as obsolete, almost extinct [Sweet 1898, 109], Some authors express an opinion that the forms of Subjunctive I will soon disappear completely from the language except the well established phrases like God bless you!. But in the other variants of the English language these forms came to stay and were never ousted by the analytical forms, probably due to their simplicity and convenience.



Nowadays, much under the pressure of the American variant of the language, the forms of Subjunctive I undergo the process of reintroduction into the British variant of English and occur quite frequently. The language purists call such cases Americanisms but then there are quite a lot of such 'Americanisms' in the language of W.Shakespeare as we have already mentioned.

7. The grammatical category of voice is a complicated category and its study involves a number of grammatical problems, such as the problem of transitivity, derivational morphology, the actual division of the sentence, discourse arrangement etc. It occupies a very special place in the verbal categories. Its specificity lies in the fact that, unlike the other verbal categories, the change of voice is accompanied by the reconstruction of the whole sentence.

It is a grammatical category which involves the relations between the action, its doer and its object (the semantic level) and between the predicate, subject and object of the sentence (syntactic level). There exist numerous interpretations of this category given by different scholars. Some consider that

voice reflects the relations between the action and the object, others - as the relations between the subject and the object of the action, still others - as a grammatical category which shows whether the action is or is not directed at the subject of the sentence. The comparison of these different interpretations shows that the difference between them lies not in the essence but in the focus of the linguist's attention.

In fact the category of voice reflects the relations between the two structures of the sentence; the surface, or syntactic structure and the deep, or semantic structure. This interpretation of the essence of this category was first given by a group of Leningrad scholars headed by Professor A. A. Kholodovich and it seems very convincing. They undertook the study of this category on the material of several languages. In their study of voice they differentiate the relations between the units of the syntactic level: the syntactic subject and object and the units of the semantic level: the semantic subject and object, or the agent and the recipient of the action. The scheme of the relations between these two levels was called the diateze and voice is defined as the grammatically marked diateze, i.e. the regular indication of the relations between the units of the syntactic and the semantic levels of the sentence by the form of the verb[ripoSjieMBi xeopmi rpaMMaTHHectcoro sanora 1978]. This interpretation appears to be quite adequate as it points out the morphological character of the voice and its correlation to the syntactic and semantic structures of the sentence, thus binding morphology, syntax and semantics together.

The category of voice is constituted by the binary privative opposition Passive :: Non-passive. The formal marker of the Passive voice is the auxiliary be and the morpheme of PII. In colloquial speech get is also used, e.g. He got arrested. Get is most often used in colloquial speech to imply that the subject of the sentence suffers adversely as a result of the action, e.g. My friend got fired. Even when the subject does not suffer adversely the get-passive suggests that the subject has been truly affected by the action, e.g. My friend got promoted last week [Berk 1999, 118].

In terms of diateze the form of the active voice marks the parallelism between the syntactic and semantic structures of the sentence. E.g., in the sentence They asked no questions the syntactic subject they corresponds to the semantic subject, or the agent of the action and the syntactic object questions -to the semantic object, or the recipient of the action. In the sentence No questions were asked the Passive voice marks the absence of such parallelism: the syntactic subject questions corresponds to the semantic object and the semantic subject they is not represented in the syntactic structure of the sentence.

The meaning of the Active voice is rather wide and indefinite and therefore best defined negatively as 'non-passive'. The forms of the active voice can manifest that:

- the action is directed at.the object (which is the case with transitive verbs), e.g. He loved a crowd, he wanted to see smart people and be seen (S. Maugham);

- the action is not directed at an object (with intransitive verbs), e.g. He stumbled about the room cursing breathlessly (D. Lodge);

- the subject of the sentence is both the agent and the recipient of the action ( the so-called reflexive meaning), e.g. He cut himself while shaving. He dressed quickly and went out.

- the subject and object of the sentence are both agents and recipients of the action (the so-called reciprocal meaning), e.g. They blamed each other. They kissed and parted.

- the meaning of an agent is ascribed to the object (the so-called middle voice), e.g. The book sold in two million copies. The cloth washes well This use of the Active voice is referred to as pseudo-passive [Berk 1999, 122] and the cases of pseudo-passive are numerous. E.g. // was rubbish, but annoying! the sort of rubbish that wouldn 't sell! As every Forsyte knows, rubbish that sells is not rubbish at all - far from it (J. Galsworthy). I cannot, of course, tell Stew that nothing is doing (S. Turow).

These examples can, in fact, be treated as cases of neutralization. The role of neutralizers is fulfilled by the subjects of the sentence - their semantics suggests that their referents can only be the recipients of the actions denoted by the verbs with which they combine, but not agents. Similar cases of neutralization occur in the sphere of non-finite forms, e.g. The house is to let. The house wanted doing up (J. Galsworthy). Many sentences were pronounced in that darkened room and the prisoners often needed cheering (R. Kipling).

The ability of the verb to build a passive form is related to the transitivity of a verb. But there exist quite a few questions related to transitivity. First, there is no one-to-one correspondence between a verb's transitivity and its ability to passivize. Passive transforms are possible only from transitive verbs, but not all transitive verbs can passivize. The ability of the verb to passivize is determined by three interrelated factors: the semantics of the transitive verb, the degree of agentiveness in the subject and the degree to which the object is affected by the action. Verbs denoting concrete physical actions passivize most easily: the subjects in the sentences with such verbs denote active agents and objects are affected by the action, e.g. Jack built this house - This house was built by Jack. With verbs of sense perception the subject denotes not an active agent but an experiencer of the action and the object is not affected by the action. Some of such verbs can passivize and some cannot, e.g. No one saw the accident - The accident was seen, but No one smelled the smoke - * The smoke was not smelled. The verbs of liking and disliking can passivize (Everyone admires her - She is admired by -everyone), whereas the verbs of wanting and desire usually resist passivization (I want this coat - * The coat is wanted ). The verb want is used in the Passive but with a different meaning, e.g. Ben Laden wanted dead or alive (a newspaper headline).

On the other hand, there are sentences with the verb in the Passive voice in the language that do not have active correlates, e.g. He is rumored to be in love. He was born in India. He is reputed to be an honest man.

In fact, transitivity in English appears to be a more fluid feature than in other languages. There are, of course, verbs that are strictly transitive (to build, to read etc.) and verbs which are strictly intransitive (to arrive, to come etc.). But since many verbs in English are polysemantic they may be transitive in one meaning and intransitive in another, e.g. He ran for his life. This is how a good society is run (M.Thatcher). He cried bitterly. I cried two solitary tears (E. O'Brien).

Of special interest are the verbs which take a prepositional object and passivize, e.g. He was made fun of. This book is often referred to. He can be relied on. Analyzing the specificity of such verbs, R.M. W.Dixon introduces the notion of 'verbs with inherent prepositions', i.e. verbs which are not used without prepositions. It is such verbs with inherent prepositions that can passivize like verbs with non-prepositional direct objects. Therefore he suggests that verbs with inherent prepositions should be treated as transitive [Dixon 1991, 270]. There seems to be a good deal of reason in this opinion. Even if we suppose that the preposition belongs more to the noun than to the verb and compare the non-prepositional and prepositional objects like They made fun of him and They ridiculed him we still see that the difference between these two types of objects appears to be strictly formal, and semantically they do not differ. Both the non-prepositional and the prepositional syntactic objects are semantically equivalent - they denote the semantic object of the action and both the sentences passivize easily: He was ridiculed. He was made fun of.

The recognition of verbs with inherent prepositions and the inclusion of such verbs into the subclass of transitive verbs make it necessary to reconsider the traditional statement made by grammarians about the possibility of prepositional objects to be used as subjects in passive constructions. There are a lot of prepositional objects that never become the subjects of passive constructions, e.g. / did it for you. It's only inherent prepositions that allow verbs to passivize easily.

Another statement of the traditional grammar that requires reconsideration is that sometimes an adverbial modifier of place can become the subject of a passive construction, e.g. The house is not lived in. The bed was not slept in. Actually, the list of such adverbial modifiers as well as the list of the verbs that can passivize with such adverbial modifiers is very limited: live, sleep, lie and sit. Thus we can say: 'This bed has been slept in by several generations', but "The bed has been died in by several generations' is hardly possible. Like in the previous case, it is worthwhile to look at the semantics of such sentences, because passivization involves, as we have already mentioned, not only the verb but also the subject and the object. A closer look at such sentences reveals that the verbs used in passive constructions undergo a considerable modification of their meanings and become similar to the verb 'use', i.e. they become close in their semantics to transitive verbs. Correspondingly the nouns bed, house etc., formally used in the syntactic position of adverbial modifiers also undergo a change of their semantics: they denote not so much places of action as the objects affected or not affected by the action [Jacobs 1995, 163], It is noteworthy that the verb sleep can be used as a transitive verb in the form of the active voice, e.g. Henry Metelsky was born on the Low East of New York on May 18 th, 1909 in a small room that already slept four children (J. Archer). So we may conclude that it is not so much the ability of an adverbial modifier to become the subject of a passive construction as the ability of verbs to modify their meanings and become close to transitive verbs which makes their passivization possible.

The special feature of the English language in the sphere of passivization lies in the fact that not only a direct object, but an indirect object can become the subject of a passive construction which results in the possibility of two passive transforms of one verb, e.g. He was given a present. A present was given to him. The choice of the passive construction is determined by the actual division of the sentence, i.e. the ,choice of an argument for the theme and the rheme in the utterance.

The passive transforms and their active correlates are usually said to have the same, propositional contents, i.e. they reflect the same situation of reality. In fact voice is a category which makes it possible to view the events presented in the sentence in two ways. Sentences in the Active and the Passive Voice usually name the same situation of reality but present a different viewing of this situation - in the sentence with the Passive Voice the focus is on the object subjected to an action rather than the agent of the action. (For some sentences however the assumption about the same propositional contents is not true. The much quoted example is the following pair of sentences: Beavers build dams. Dams are built by beavers. The two sentences reveal essential difference in their meanings).

There is also an essential difference between active-passive pairs containing negation and a modal verb, e.g. Celia will not meet John at the airport. John will not be met by Celia. In the first sentences the unwillingness to meet John is ascribed to Celia, and in the second sentence - to John. This difference between the meanings of the two sentences is probably explained by the fact that the modal verb 'wiW is semantically related not to the semantic object, which is the case with the verb 'meet' but to the syntactic subject of the sentence.

The passive forms have a much lower frequency of use as compared to the active forms. According to the statistics given by T. Givon, the average frequency of passive forms in English is between 4% (for a less educated register) up to 18% for a highly intellectual text [Givon 1979,58]). Though the passive sentences are not very frequent they are indispensable for the language and the speakers of the language always have a good reason for preferring a passive construction to active. Though the passive and active sentences usually reflect the same situation of reality they present different ways of viewing this situation. The process of passivization is never automatic or random but is always dictated by certain structural, semantic and pragmatic considerations. The switch from the active construction to a passive often signals the switch of attention from the agent of the action to the object affected by the action. Most of the passive sentences (between 80% and 85% ) are agentless [Berk 1999, 12]). There are several reasons for using an agentless passive.

1) The agent is unknown. Such cases are common for thrillers and police reports and are called 'Sinister Passive' by English grammarians. E.g. Entry was made through the door. No objects appear to have been removed. He had been killed in his sleep (S.Maugham).

2) The agent is known but not relevant. It is usually the case in scientific style where the attention is focused on the object rather than the agent. E.g. Many attempts have been- made to find central or basic meanings for each modal that can explain their common and effortless use (F.Catamba).

3) When the speaker does not want to reveal the identity of the agent and deliberately avoids mentioning the agent. The Watergate scandal in the USA produced the weak admission from the administration that 'Mistakes -were made'. Let's analyze one more example: For a moment I consider the tool with which I am working. A Watchamacallit. The Watchamacallit is a piece of black iron, a kind of cross between a hammer's claw and a crowbar. You can use it for anything. On the night of April 1, it was used to kill Carolyn Polthemus (S.Turow). The man who is considering the tool realizes with horror that the person who committed the crime is his own wife but he dreads to admit it even to himself, so the agentless passive becomes an important syntactic device which allows the speaker to avoid mentioning the agent of the action.

Very often the agent of the action is not mentioned deliberately for reasons for politeness. The phenomenon of politeness finds numerous manifestations in the English language and the use of the agentless passive is just of them. E.g. Could we possibly have the TV switched off? (Instead of: Could you switch off the TV?

4) The agent of the action is not mentioned when it is a general person. This use occurs in general statements expressing universal truths. E.g. Hungry people are easily led (K.Mansfield). Sometimes the speakers deliberately resort to passive constructions to make their own opinions sound like universal truths,

e.g. Such a behaviour is not considered appropriate (Instead of: I do noi consider your behaviour appropriate)

5) The speaker deliberately focuses his/her attention on the object, thus making the object more important than the agent. E.g. "Are you being helped/served? " My wife was promoted last week. Instead, all commerce is transacted in thus staircase. Dope is sold, wine is drunk, love is made (S. Turow).

On the other hand, when the speaker wishes to accentuate the attention on the agent, the passive construction is also a very convenient tool for accentuating the agent by placing it at the end of the sentence, e.g. When the Black Madonna was installed in the church of the Sacred Heart the Bishop himself came to consecrate it. The Black Madonna had been given to the church by a recent convert (M.Spark). The use of the Passive voice in such sentences is necessitated by the needs of the actual division to make the rheme of the sentence prominent.

The Passive construction is also preferred when there are several agents. This phenomenon is known as 'the end weight'. 'Heavy' subjects are usually shifted to the end of the sentence. E.g. He was accompanied to the station by his wife Judith, his son John, his daughter Clara and his dog Rover. This use of the Passive constructions is dictated by the syntactic norms of the English sentence. Another syntactic rule of English which sometimes determines the choice of a passive construction consists in retaining the same syntactic subject within a composite or a semicomposite sentence or two adjoining sentences. But if this subject denotes the .agent of action in one sentence (or one part of the sentence) and the object in the other, it usually requires the use of Passive. E.g. He came into the room and the next moment he was greeted warmly by everyone. The public was being lied to and knew it (D.Bolinger). A small quantity of a dark liquid remained in the saucepan, and an empty cup that had been drunk of stood near it (A.Christie). This rule is also related to the actual division of the sentence. The Passive construction is a handy means of retaining the theme of the sentence and in this way it helps to organize discourse. Another rule of discourse arrangement is that the rheme of the previous sentence usually becomes the theme of the following sentence and the Passive voice is again indispensable in such cases. E.g. When the Australian national team defeated the English national team in a test series in August of 1882, it was the first time England had been defeated on her own soil. In reaction to the loss, the Sporting Times ran a mock obituary in which the paper declared that English cricket "died at the Oval on 29th August 1882. The obituary was followed by a note informing readers that "the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia (E. George)

Thus we can see that the Passive voice carries out an important discursive function as it helps to organize discourse in ah orderly manner and also participates in the discourse progress.

Besides the grammatical means of expressing voice, voice-like distinctions may also be expressed by units of other lingual levels. There are nouns that form oppositions on the basis of voice distinctions; an employer — an employee, an examiner — an examinee etc.On analogy with existing oppositions authors often coin new words, e.g. Rennie was an expert on boredom, having done a piece on it for Pandora's "Relationships" column in •which she claimed that there were two people involved in boredom: the borer and the boree (M.Atwood).

Voice-like distinctions are also observed in the opposition of such verbs as give and get. Give is associated with the agent of an action and get - with the object of an action, e.g. give instructions is semantically equivalent to instruct and get instructions — to be instructed.

Another regular means of expressing voice-like meanings is the subclass of adjectives with the suffix - abl-e/ible - readable, walkable, doable etc. These adjectives are characterized by a mixed categorial semantics. Derived from verbs, they denote a potential ability of an object to be acted upon: readable -can be read, walkable - can be walked etc. These adjectives are regularly used to express passive meanings and they are referred to as ''curious implicit passive' [Bolinger 1980, 87]. Their proximity to the grammatical forms of the Passive voice becomes rnost evident when they are followed by a 'by-phrase' introducing the agent of the potential action or form a voice-like opposition with the verb in the Active voice E.g. / am afraid, I am not too easily persuadable by your stepson, Aunt Nan (Ch. Lamb).I'll arrange it if it is_ arrangeable (H. Wouk).

These adjectives also serve as a convenient means to avoid mentioning the doer of the action and they are often chosen for pragmatic purposes when the speaker deliberately tries not to mention the doer of the action, e.g. Cohn wanted some changes; if I agreed the film would be doable, he said (A. Miller).

The existence of various means of expressing voice distinctions makes it possible «to consider voice as a functional-semantic category with the grammatical category of voice as its center and other means of expressing voice as a periphery.

 


Date: 2015-01-12; view: 1596


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