The Category of Aspect

Under aspect scholars understand a mode (a phase) of an action, that is, continuity, progressiveness, completion, resultativity, instantaneousness, etc.).

The following problems are open to discussion here:1. Some scholars don’t recognize the existence of this category in English. They hold that aspectual relations of completeness/ incompleteness, continuity, resultativity are expressed contextually by lexico-grammatical means. The continuous and perfect forms are treated as tenses. 2. Those who recognize it find it either a logical or a grammatical category. 3. Scholars who treat aspect as a logical category distinguish 5 aspects. The ingressive aspect denotes the initial phase of an action ( He went running. He started reading.). The durative aspect denotes a progressive action( He is eating). The terminative aspect represents an action as a finished whole ( It hit the target). The effective aspect denotes the final point of an action (He has done it. He came running ). The iterative aspect denotes repeated actions (He often gets sick. He would come here every day last month).Those who recognize aspect as a grammatical category distinguish either 3 aspects {the imperfect aspect ( He was doing it);the perfect aspect( He has done it); the indefinite aspect( He did it)} or 2 aspects(thecommon and the continuous). 4. Debated is the paradigmatic meaning of the continuous form. It is interpreted as durationorlimited duration (Jespersen), simultaneity(Vorontsova), continuity within certain time limits (Ilyish), development(Blokh). 5. The category of aspect penetrates other verbal categories. The categories of tense and aspect are blended, they are inseparable and should be treated jointly. This view was advanced by professors Vorontsova and Ivanova. According to professors Barkhudarov, Smirnitsky, Ilyish tense and aspect are two distinct categories, tense showing the time of an action and aspect showing the development of an action.

Professors Smirnitsky, Barkhudarov, Ilyish, Khlebnikova find aspect to be a grammatical category based on the binary privative opposition of two forms read::am reading ,reads:: is reading, has read:: has been reading, etc., which represent the common aspect and the continuous aspect. M.Y. Blokh distinguished the aspectual category of development which is based on the opposition of the continuous and the noncontinuous forms. The distinction between the continuous and the noncontinuous forms can be neutralized (You are always complaining = you always complain). So, semantically, continuous forms are redundant. But, stylistically, they are of extreme importance, as they actively participate in the creation of sentential and textual emotiveness, expressiveness, intensiveness and evaluation (positive and negative).

The semantic content of continuous forms comes to be rather complex. We can distinguish in it the paradigmatic invariant seme of continuity and the syntagmatic semes of permanence, timelessness, futurity, emotiveness, intensiveness, expressiveness, evaluation.

There are some factors in modern English which occasion the frequent usage of continuous forms. Important are artistic considerations, as continuous forms are more emphatic than noncontinuous forms. There is psychological explanation of the growing usage of continuous forms. The British are becoming more impulsive, forgetting about their traditional reticence (suffice it to remember about the aggressiveness of British football fans). Continuous forms are more frequent in the speech of females. As a result of semantic disagreement between the non-dynamic meaning of the verb and the dynamic meaning of a continuous form a grammatical metaphor is being born which makes discourse more dynamic, emotive, evaluatory (I’m not listening, I’m not seeing, I’m not feeling. I’m falling in love with you again).In artistic texts authors most often impart dynamism to normally undynamic verbs (Now he was remembering everything.Is she still liking England? Loving it). Continuous forms participate in the creation of an ironic effect, which is based upon contrasts and contradictions ( You are being very charitable today). A person, normally, cannot be charitable for a very limited period of time.

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<== попередня сторінка	\|	наступна сторінка ==>
The Present Tense	\|	The Category of Time Relation (or Correlation)

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