THEME 10. THE VERB: THE FINITE FORMS OF THE VERB. THE CATEGORIES OF PERSON, NUMBER, TENSE. Part II
Plan
1. Time and Tense.
Time as the philosophical category and Tense as a grammatical category of the verb.
- The traditional and modern conceptions of the category of Tense.
The Category of Tense
According to the traditional view, reflected in various grammar manuals, in the tense system there are three tenses: present, past, future. Besides, there is one tense form, which has the name of future-in-the-past.
On the one hand, it renders the future relations, on the other, it shows that these relations are somewhat connected with the past.
While for the first three forms, those of future, past and present, the starting point is the moment of speaking which is associated with the present, for the future-in-the-past the starting point is in the past; that’s why, though the states-of-affairs are called future, they can refer to the Future proper, Present or Past.
E.g. Little as he was, he understood that this big handsome young papa would not come back any more, that he was dead as he had heard of their people being… Here the action expressed by the form of Future-in-the-Past is referred to the Future proper.
E.g. I’d no idea you would be staying here, Bess, I had not the faintest idea of it… In this sentence the action expressed by the form would be staying is referred to the Present (Bess is the vocative that shows it).
E.g. It was in one of his fits of petulance he sent him off to travel in America; he thought that he would send him away for a while… But after about six months he began to feel lonely, and longed in secret to see his son again. Here the context refers the action to the Past.
We could try to represent the tense system like a straight line.
The graphic presentation of the tense categories reveals the contradictory nature of the four-tense system. The ambivalence of the system lies in the fact that trying to find the features typical of all the forms we inevitably come to two starting points which means no system.
The status quo, when some grammatical phenomenon can’t be described in terms of a definite system, could appear on condition that this phenomenon doesn’t belong to the system discussed. Hence, the Future-in-the-Past forms belong to a different system, other than one that embraces the Present, Past and Future forms, and are incompatible with it (don’t fit the system).
The attempts to overcome the inner contradictory nature of the category of tense can be boiled down to this:
1) Future-in-the-Past doesn’t belong to the system of tenses and is included into it by force of tradition through misunderstanding.
2) Attempts to regard tense at a different angle, find a system which is built on a different principle.
In keeping with these two ways we can speak of the view point of A. I. Smirnitsky.
According to him, the English language admits of three tenses – Present, Past, Future, the Future-in-the-Past being a form of the Conditional Mood, not that of a Tense, his proofs being that the forms of the Future-in-the-Past analogous with the Conditional Mood coincide (from the formal point). It is also their meaning that allows one to identify them as belonging to the category of Mood. But on reflection one can’t help but admit that these arguments don’t hold water at least, his attempt of displaying the similarity of their meaning is not convincing.
According to B. A. Ilyish, there are 3 tenses, but his attitude towards Future-in-the-Past is not clear, whether it belongs to the system or doesn’t.
The viewpoint of I. P. Ivanova is an example of the second different approach to the problem. Her theory is centred around the so-called time center. According to her, there two moments – that of the past and that of the future – with which the actions expressed by the past and future correlate and by means of which they correlate with the moment of speaking. With the introduction of this notion Professor I. P. Ivanova has come to discriminate between dependent and independent elements that constitute the tense system. The independent elements are all Present forms because they correlate with the moment of speaking, the Future Indefinite and Past Indefinite including which correlate with the moment of speaking; but the Past Indefinite is also a dependent tense: it becomes dependent when the Sequence of Tenses takes place. The rest of the tense forms are dependent because they directly correlate only with their time centres, their connection with the moment of speaking being indirect. To the dependent past forms belong Past Continuous, Past Perfect, Past Perfect Continuous, all the Future-in-the-Past forms because their time centre is in the past. To the dependent future forms belong Future Continuous, Future Perfect and Future Perfect Continuous forms which directly correlate with the centre of the future. The notion of the time centre admits of an opportunity to represent the category of tense as an eight-tense system.
We cannot expound on the theory, here we’ll mention only that there is no place for Future-in-the-Past in this system. It is of not much help to a linguist, because it gives the facts of the language which do not fit into the Procrustean Bed of the author’s concept.
The four-tense system is of no scientific value either, though widely spread in teaching, since it offers no scientific presentation and consideration of facts. It just deals with tenses as a grammatical category or a number of facts.
Now we’ve come to a two-tense system offered by L. S. Barkhudarov.
According to this view, the forms traditionally called as future can’t be regarded as proper grammatical forms, because in every case their first component (shall, will) preserves its modal meaning and can’t be regarded as auxiliary, that is a formal index of some grammatical meaning. Hence, the whole complex of shall/will + infinitive must be regarded as a free combination of two words, not as an analytical form of the verb especially as the infinitives correlate only with their time centres. Here belong the Past Continuous, Perfect, Perfect Continuous, Future-in-the-Past, because their centre is in the Past!
For lack of time and space, we can no longer expound on the I.P. Ivanova’s viewpoint, so the student should turn to the books recommended.
In Modern English the grammatical expression of verbal time, i.e. tense, is effected in two stages. M. Y. Bloch calls the first stage an absolute time, which is expressed by an opposition of two verb forms: the Past Tense :: the Present Tense. The marked, strong member of the opposition, is the Past form, the Non-Past tense form being unmarked or weak. The second stage receives a non-absolute relative time characteristic and may be called a relative time. It is expressed by an opposition of two forms: the Future tense form :: the Non-Future tense form. Since the two stages of the verbal time denotation are expressed separately, by the oppositional forms of their own, and besides, have essentially different orientation characteristics, it stands to reason that one should recognize that there are two temporal categories in the system of the English verb. M. Y. Bloch suggests calling the first of them the category of ‘primary time’ and the second, the category of ‘prospective time’.
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