CONTROVERSIAL ASPECTS OF THE ENGLISH VERB

The verb in English distinguishes the following categories: the category of person and number, tense, aspect, voice and mood. The basic problems with the interpretation of verbal forms are caused by typological restructuring of the English language, which has led to the extinction of most inflectional verbal forms, the appearance of new analytical forms, reduction of and confusion in verbal paradigms in the history of English.

The most controversial are the categories of tense and aspect. The major problem is the fusion of temporal and aspectual semantics and the blend in their formal expression; that is why in practical grammar they are traditionally treated not as separate verbal forms but as specific tense-aspect forms, cf.: the present continuous – I am working; the past perfect continuous – I had been working; the future indefinite – I will work, etc.

In theoretical grammar the two categories are treated separately, but still, there is a lot of dispute among linguists. As for the category of tense, the problem is that there are not just three tense forms of the verb like in Russian – the past, the present and the future, but four forms – the past, the present, the future and the future-in-the-past (ate – eat – will eat – would eat). The future-in-the-past is particularly controversial from the point of view of its theoretical interpretation, because, logically speaking, one and the same category cannot be expressed twice in one and the same grammatical form; the members of one paradigm should be mutually exclusive. Some linguists, O. Jespersen and L. S. Barkhudarov among them, go as far as to state the there is no future tense in English at all. They claim that the verbs shall/will and should/would are not auxiliary verbs, but modal verbs denoting intention, command, request, promise, etc. in a weakened form, e.g.: I’ll go there by train means I intend (want, plan) to go there by train.

Some of the controversies can be tackled if verbal categories are treated oppositionally on the basis of their functional semantics. Semantically, tense, as the grammatical expression of time, may be either oriented toward the moment of speech, “absolutive”, or it may be “relative”, when it shows the correlation of two or more events. The “absolute time” embraces the past, the present and the future; the “relative time” embraces the priority, the simultaneity and the posteriority. The present and the past forms of the verb in English render absolutive time semantics, referring the events to either the plane of the present or to the plane of the past, while the two future tense forms of the verb express relative future: they present the process as an after-event in relation to the present, e.g.: He will work tomorrow (not right not), and as an after-event in relation to the past, e.g.: He said he would work the next day. So, according to the approach formulated by professor Blokh, there is not just one verbal category of tense in English but two interconnected tense sub-categories: the first, which can be called “primary time”, “absolutive time”, or “retrospective time”, is expressed by the opposition of the past and the present forms (e.g.: work-worked); the second, which may be called “prospective”, or “relative”, is formed by the opposition of the future and the non-future separately in relation to the present or to the past (e.g.: work(s) - shall/will work, or worked - should/would work).

As for the aspect, the analysis of this category has always been a highly controversial area of English linguistics: the four aspective forms of the verb - the indefinite, the continuous, the perfect, and the perfect continuous - have been treated by different scholars as tense forms, as aspect forms, as forms of mixed tense-aspect status, and as neither tense nor aspect forms, but as forms of a separate grammatical category.

For example, the grammatical meaning of the continuous was originally treated as a tense form, denoting a process going on simultaneously with another process; this temporal interpretation was developed by H. Sweet, O. Jespersen and others. I. P. Ivanova treated the continuous as rendering a blend of temporal and aspective semantics, denoting an action in progress, simultaneous with another action or time point. The majority of linguists today support the point of view developed by A. I. Smirnitsky, B. A. Ilyish, L. S. Barkhudarov, and others, that the meaning of the continuous is purely aspective, denoting “action in progress”, or “developing action”. The fact is, simultaneity is rendered by either the syntactic construction or the broader semantic context, since it is quite natural for the developing action to be connected with a certain time point. Actually, simultaneous actions can be shown with or without the help of the continuous verbal forms, cf.: While I worked, they were speaking with each other. – While I worked, they spoke with each other.

The traditional treatment of the perfect was also primarily as the tense form denoting the priority of one action in relation to another; the so-called “perfect tense” interpretation was developed by H. Sweet, G. Curme, and others. M. Deutchbein, G. N. Vorontsova and other linguists consider the perfect to be a purely aspective form, laying the main emphasis on the fact that the perfect forms denote some result, some transmission of the pre-event to the post-event. I. P. Ivanova treats the perfect, as well as the continuous, as the verbal form expressing temporal and aspective functions in a blend. A. I. Smirnitsky was the first to put forward the idea that the perfect forms its own category, which is neither a tense category, nor an aspect category; he suggested the name “the category of time correlation”. One of Smirnitsky’s arguments was the status of the perfect-continuous form in connection with the logical controversy already mentioned: one and the same category cannot be expressed twice in one grammatical form.

According to professor Blokh’s approach, this contradiction can be solved in exactly the same way that was employed with the tense category: the category of aspect, just like the category of tense, is not a unique grammatical category in English, but a system of two sub-categories. The first sub-category is realized through the paradigmatic opposition of the continuous (progressive) forms and the non-continuous (indefinite, simple) forms of the verb; this category can be called the category of development. The second aspective sub-category is formed by theopposition of the perfect and the non-perfect forms of the verb; this category can be called “the category of retrospective coordination”. This sub-category is semantically intermediate between aspective and temporal, because the perfect combines the meanings of priority (relative time) and coordination, transmission, or result (aspective meaning).

Oppositional presentation helps provide functional explanation for various cases of contextual use of tense and aspect forms in terms of oppositional reduction - either neutralization of the opposition or transposition. For example, the neutralization of the category of development regularly takes place with unlimitive verbs, especially statal verbs like to be, to have, verbs of sense perception, relation, etc., e.g.: I have a problem; I love you. Their indefinite forms are used instead of the continuous for semantic reasons: statal verbs denote developing processes by their own meaning. Since such cases are systemically fixed in English grammar, the use of the statal verbs in the continuous can be treated as “reverse transposition” (“de-neutralization” of the opposition): their meaning is transformed, they become actional for the nonce, and most of such cases are stylistically colored, cf.: You are being naughty!; I’m loving it! The cases of the tense category reduction include the cases of the present tense form of the verb used to describe past events in order to create a vivid picture of the past, e.g.: I stopped to greet him and what do you think he does? He pretends he doesn’t know me! This type of transposition is known as “historic present” (or, “preterite present”). The transposition of the past tense forms into the context of the present is used to express various degrees of politeness, e.g.: Could you help me, please? These cases are known as “preterite of modesty”, or “attitudinal past”. Oppositional treatment can explain other cases of contextual use of tense and aspect verbal forms too.

Another verbal category which has given rise to much dispute is the category of mood in English. The nomenclature of the oblique mood types, denoting unreality of action, presents a great problem because most of its forms are homonymous with the forms of the indicative, denoting real actions. Different classifications of the oblique mood types are based either on formal criteria or on functional criteria: scholars distinguish synthetical and analytical moods (e.g.: If I were you… - synthetical mood, … I would stay – analytical mood), past and present moods (e.g.: I wish I stayed – I demand that he stay); semantically the so-called imperative, subjunctive, conditional and suppositional moods are distinguished. Today, there is no universally accepted classification of verbal mood forms; their number varies from as many as sixteen (in the classification of M. Deutschbein) to practically no mood at all (according to L. S. Barkhudarov).

According to professor Blokh’s approach, since all the oblique mood types share a common meaning of unreality, they may be terminologically united as subjunctive; and then several types of the subjunctive can be distinguished according to the form of expression and various shades of unreality expressed. The mood which is traditionally called subjunctive I, expresses various attitudes of the speaker: desire, consideration (supposition, suggestion, hypothesis), inducement (recommendation, request, command, order), etc. The form of subjunctive I is homonymous with the bare infinitive: Long live the king! I demand that the case be investigated thoroughly. Subjunctive II in form is homonymous with the past tense forms of the verbs in the indicative mood, except for the verb to be, which, according to standard grammar, in all persons and numbers is used in the form were. Subjunctive II is used mostly in the subordinate clauses of complex sentences with causal-conditional relations, such as the clauses of unreal condition, e.g.: If she tried, (she would manage it); If I were you…; and a number of related meanings, for example, of urgency, e.g.: (It’s high time) she tried to change the situation; or of unreal wish, e.g.: (I wish) she tried harder; If only she tried! Subjunctive III (traditionally known as the “conditional”) denotes the corresponding consequence of an unreal condition in the principal part of the causal-conditional sentences; in form it is homonymous with the analytical future in the past tense forms (the past posterior) of verbs in the indicative mood, e.g.: (If she tried), she would manage it. Subjunctive IV (traditionally referred to as “modal suppositional”) is built with the help of modal verbs, and expresses the same semantic types of unreality as subjunctive I, cf.: may/might + infinitive – is used to denote wish, desire, hope, and supposition, e.g.: May it be so! (cf. with subjunctive I: Be it so!); should + infinitive, e.g.: Whatever my mother should say about him, we’ll marry one day (cf. with subjunctive I: Whatever my mother say about him, we’ll marry one day).

In traditional grammar, besides the direct and oblique moods, the so-called imperative mood is distinguished, as in Open the door! or Let’s agree to differ; Let him do it his own way! The analysis of such examples shows that there is basically no difference between what is traditionally called the imperative and subjunctive I for the 2^nd person or subjunctive IV for the other persons: the meaning rendered by the so-called imperative is that of a hypothetical action appraised as an object of desire, recommendation, supposition, etc. and its forms are homonymous either with the bare infinitive or the constructions with the semi-notional verb “to let”. Thus, inducement can be treated as a specific type of unreality and the imperative mood can be treated as a subtype of subjunctive I or subjunctive IV. It can be noted that L. S. Barkhudarov, who denied the existence of the oblique moods in English, treated subjunctive I, vice versa, as a subtype of the imperative.

Problems in treating the category of mood in English are also caused by the fact that the whole system of the mood is not stable; it is still developing and the use of forms fluctuates a lot: for example, the form was today is often used instead of were in the third person singular in subjunctive II (If he was here…), the auxiliaries should and would are often interchangeable, etc. In colloquial speech the semantic and formal contrasts between the indicative, the past subjunctive and the modal subjunctive are often neutralized, e.g.: It is impossible that he is right/ that he should be right/ that he be right.

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