The category of tense

Time is an unlimited duration in which things are considered as happening in the past, present or future. Time stands for a concept with which all mankind is familiar. Time is independent of language. Tense stands for a verb form used to express a time relation. Time is the same to all mankind while tenses vary in different languages. Time can be expressed in language in two basic ways: 1) lexically; 2) grammatically.

The category of tense is considered to be an immanent grammatical category which means that the finite verb form always expresses time distinctions. The category of tense finds different interpretations with different scholars.

According to one view, there are only two tenses in English: past and present. Most British scholars do not recognize the existence of future. It is considered to be a combination of the modal verb and an infinitive used to refer to future actions. The modal verbs “shall” and “will” preserve their lexical meaning of “wish, volition”. In that case combinations of the modal verbs with notional verbs should be regarded as free syntactical constructions, not as analytical structures. However, there are some examples in which the notion of volition cannot be implied:

eg. He will die in a week.

I shall be twenty next Friday.

Provided that the situation is realistic, in these contexts lexical meanings of “shall” and “will” are not present. These elements render only grammatical meanings, therefore they serve as auxiliaries and such combinations must be regarded as analytical structures. So we have to recognize the existence of pure futurity in English.

In traditional linguistics grammatical time is often represented as a three- form category consisting of the “linear” past, present and future forms. The meaning of the category of tense is the relation of the action expressed by a finite verb to the moment of speaking. Present denotes coincidence, past denotes a prior action, future denotes a posterior action which follows the moment of speaking.

The future-in-the-past does not find its place in the scheme based on the linear principle since it does not show any relation to the moment of speaking, hence this system is considered to be deficient, not covering all lingual data. Those who deny the existence of simple future in English consider future-in-the-past one of the mood forms. Those who recognize the existence of simple future argue that it is used in the same situation when simple future is used, in subordinate clauses when the principal clause contains a past form. So, this form is different only in one respect - it is dependent on the syntactic structure.

According to the concept worked out by Prof. Blokh, there exist two tense categories in English. The first one - the category of primary time - expresses a direct retrospective evaluation of the time of the process denoted. It is based upon the opposition of past vs. present, the past tense being its strong member. The second one - the category of “prospective time” - is based on the opposition of “after-action” and “non-after-action”, the marked member being the future tense.

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