THEME 10. THE VERB: THE FINITE FORMS OF THE VERB. THE CATEGORIES OF PERSON, NUMBER, TENSE. Part I
Plan
1. The category of person in Modern English.
2. The category of number.
3. Time and Tense.
Time as the philosophical category and Tense as a grammatical category of the verb.
4. The traditional and modern conceptions of the category of Tense.
Among the verb categories to be considered first are those of person and number. Unlike the other verb categories, such as tense, aspect, voice, mood and time correlation, they are not immanent, they are reflective.
The Category of Person
The category of person in the Indo-European languages serves to present an action as associated by the speaker, the person or the persons addressed and the person or thing (persons or things) not participating in the process of speech. Thus in Russian it is represented in sets of three-member opposemes such as:
Читаю – читаешь – читает
Читаем – читаете – читают
Likewise in German we have:
Gehen – gehst – geht
Gehen – geht – gehen
In Modern English the category of person has certain peculiarities.
The second member of the opposemes such as Speak – speakest – speaks is not used colloquially. Neither is the second member of the opposemes of the verb to ‘be’: am – art – is.
They occur only in poetry, in solemn or pathetic prose with a distinct archaic flavor:
e.g. Kind nature, thou art
To all a bountiful mother
The category of person is practically represented by two-member opposemes: are :: is, speak :: speaks.
Person opposemes are neutralized when associated with the plural meaning. A.I. Smirnitsky thinks that owing to the presence of the plural personal pronouns (we, you, they) person distinctions are felt in the plural of the verb as well: e.g. we know, you know. The idea is open to criticism. If the verb itself in the plural does not show any person distinctions we are to admit that in Modern English the verb in the plural has no person.
Thus if we overlook the archaic ‘writest’ or ‘speakest’, we’ll have to admit that in all verbs (but the defective verbs having no person distinctions at all: he can, she may) the person(s) opposeme is found only in the singular, and it consists of two members (speak :: speaks), the third person with a positive morpheme being opposed to the first person with a zero morpheme.
Person distinctions do not go with the meaning of the past tense in the English verb (the same in Russian: я, ты, он/она спросил).
As regards the opposition of shall/should, will/would, one has to speak of the first person as opposed to the non-first person expressed by the forms with will/would. The person distinctions in such opposemes (shall come :: will come) are not connected with number meanings.
These distinctions are being gradually obliterated through the spreading of ‘ll and the extensive use of will and would for shall and should.
The Category of Number
The category of number shows whether the action is associated with one doer or with more than one.
Accordingly it denotes something fundamentally different from what is indicated by the number of nouns. We mean here not the ‘oneness’ or ‘more-then-oneness’ of actions, but the connection with the singular or plural doer. As Mr. Bryant puts it, “He eats three times a day” doesn’t indicate a single eating but a single eater.
The category is represented in its purity in the opposeme was :: were and accordingly in all analytical forms containing was :: were.
e.g. was writing :: were writing
was written :: were written
In grammatical forms the number is blended with person am :: are, is :: are. Likewise speak :: speaks – we have the third person singular opposed to the non-third person.
Accordingly the category of number is scantily represented in Modern English.
Some verbs do not distinguish number because of their peculiar historical development (can, may, must), others are used in the singular rather seldom because the meaning of ‘oneness’ is hardly compatible with their lexical meaning (e.g. to crowd, to conspire etc.).
The Category of Tense
According to the vast majority of the grammars (both, practical and theoretical) the English active verb in the Indicative Mood has the following sets of verb forms:
I. 1. write / writes (do / does write) II. 1. am (is) / are writing
2. wrote (did write) 2. was / were writing
3. shall / will write 3. shall / will be writing
4. should / would write 4. should / would be writing
III. 1. have / has written IV. 1. have / has been writing
2. had written 2. had been writing
3. shall /will have written 3. shall / will have been writing
4. should / would have written 4. should / would have been writing
Except the first two forms of the first column write / wrote they are built in an analytical way. But these forms have the second variant, also built analytically. It is easy to notice the verb forms of each column (with the exception of column I) are united by a structural criterion: for Column II it is be + participle I,
Column III have + participle II,
Column IV have + been + participle I.
The typical feature of Column I is difficult to find. But in general it can be expressed by the formula ‘an auxiliary + infinitive’. II, III, IV are innovations which originated in different historic periods.
The forms of Column I are heterogeneous. 1, 2 – date back to the prehistoric times; 3, 4 – are innovations (XVI – XVII cc.). Hence, the difference in their structure.
XVI – XVII cc. have been witnesses to a great change that influenced the grammatical structure of the language. The old synthetical forms have been replaced by new analytical models. But as to the verb system, analytical forms have not ousted the synthetical ones in the interrogative. In the affirmative form the synthetical form has been retained, the analytical form functioning in Modern English with the emphatic meaning.
Both in practical and theoretical grammars the verb forms have got the name “tenses”. Thus, the English verb was believed to discriminate between the 16 tense forms. But the forms had also expressed meanings other than those of tense, such as continuity, repetition, result. Later these meanings were described as characterizing not the time of performing an action but the way the action was performed, and the notion “tenses” came to mean both tense and aspect relations.
But it didn’t seem to elucidate the situation. The relations between tense and aspect remain vague. So does the way they are distributed among the 16 forms.
The whole of the history of the English verb is a number of attempts to build a model of tense and aspect relations that could embrace both general and particular shades of meanings of each verb form under examination.
At present the English verb is said to have the categories of tense and aspect.
In the mid 50’s Professor A. I. Smirnitsky offered a new concept of verb forms supported nowadays by many grammarians, according to which the system of tenses represents one more grammatical meaning: that of time correlation different from that of tense and aspect. Despite the achievement in the grammar theory a number of problems have remained given rise to dispute. They are of a different nature, but all of them deal with the identification of a grammatical category as it is and its interpretation, i.e.
- Grammatical category can be identified as such when it has a definite generalized meaning or idea, regardless of the form.
- One can speak of a grammatical category when there is correlation of the definite form and the definite meaning.
- Since the grammatical structure of any language is a system of binary oppositions: two-member sets of grammatical forms opposed to each other, forming grammatical categories – one can speak of a grammatical category when it is built with the help of two opposite forms, there being 3-member – 4-member oppositions in other languages.
So it is the position of the grammarian that predetermines the solution of the main problem connected with the problem of tenses: which of the criteria – semantic or formal – unite verb forms in groups I, II, III, IV and oppose them to each other at the same time, on the other hand single out every verb form inside each of the group. In other words, what is the membership, quantity and the nomenclature of verbal grammatical categories that constitute the tenses.
However, the idea put forward by A. I. Smirnitsky is not supported by everyone. The grammarians still disagree on different points, though they accept the existence of the categories of tense and aspect, though their interpretation is different.
The Category of Tense
The grammatical category of tense renders the relationship of the objective and physical time. For man there is past time – that was, future – that will come, and the moment of being that divides them – present.
Present
………… ………
Past Future
It is these three phases in the being of a man on Earth that have found their reflection in the grammatical category of tense. Thus it has a psychological nature. But that doesn’t mean that it is subjective. In the real world a state of affairs exists in space and time. Objective time as one of the two forms of existence of matter is characterized by the following attributes: its infinite extension, linearity, and divisibility into an infinite number of segments of any size, which demonstrates the dialectal contradiction of continuity and discontinuity.
For practical purposes time can be graphically illustrated by a limitless straight line on which state-of-affairs occupy their definite positions:
……… ………
The divisibility of time allows man to establish chronometric systems (scales) such as clock time and calendar time, which provide reference points (indices) the states-of-affairs can be related to. Chronometric systems serve to define states-of-affairs with regard to their position on the time line, i.e. with regard to their duration, frequency, and chronological order.
In English this being of chronological timing is expressed by temporal phrases with explicit or implicit date, indicating a point of time, e.g. at 8 o’clock, in 1972; a time span, e.g. from 8 to 10, during the 30’s; a very long time, or frequency, e.g. every second day, often.
In addition to this kind of scale-orientated timing, state-of-affairs can be temporally related to each other. One state-of-affairs serving as a reference point, another state-of-affairs can be either simultaneous with or sequential, i.e. prior or posterior to it. In English temporal relationship is expressed by temporal connectors, e.g. meanwhile, before, afterwards, or temporal phrases such as on his arrival, before Sunday, after breakfast.
These kinds of temporal indication alone are not, however, sufficient for the purpose of practical communication. In the sentence they are always combined with indications of a relative determination of the state-of-affairs to be described taking into account the speaker/writer in his situation of communication. For the speaker the moment of speaking is the primary index of orientation (t1) in time. It subdivides the time experienced into 3 segments. The moment of speaking itself and a variable time span including it are experienced as present (in an act of direct perception). The segment preceding the moment of speaking is experienced as past (in an act of recollection), the segment following the moment of speaking as future (in an act of anticipation).
In the English sentence the state-of-affairs to be described is, however, not usually directly related to the moment of speaking, but rather via a secondary reference time or index (t2) which is placed in one of the three temporal segments. For example, He had written ten novels before he died in 1950. There is no direct relation between the moment of speaking and the time of writing the novels. Instead, the state-of-affairs (writing the novels) is related to the moment of speaking via the secondary point of reference (the author’s death in 1950), i.e. the state-of-affairs is anterior to this secondary point of reference. In other cases the state-of-affairs is experienced as posterior to or simultaneous with it. We have thus two kinds of relation: the relation between the moment of speaking (t1) and a secondary reference time (t2), and the relation between this secondary reference time (t2) and the state-of-affairs. In English there two morphological categories to express them, the category of tense expressing the relation between the moment of speaking (t1) and the secondary reference time (t2), and the category of time correlation expressing the relation between the secondary reference time (t2) and the state of affairs.