Verb: Category of Mood The first disputable issue arising from the category of mood is the ques­tion about the recognition of different kinds of moods and their number in Modern English. Foreign linguists interpreted the category of Mood in different ways. Early English language grammars in their treatment of the Subjunctive Mood copied literally principles […]

Verb: Category of Mood Verb: Category of Mood – Part 2 The Imperative Mood shows that the speaker induces somebody to perform an action. The action is presented not as a fact but as something desired. Consequently, the Imperative is opposed to the Indicative Mood se­mantically. The form of the Imperative is identical to the […]

Verb: Category of Mood Verb: Category of Mood – Part 2 Verb: Category of Mood – Part 3 Synthetic forms of the Subjunctive, identical with Infinitives and Im­perative forms, differ syntactically – they are used in subordinate clauses of condition, purpose and concession (Kim is capable of anything lest his girlfriend not break up with […]

The verbal category of Voice is an expression of relationship between an action and its subject and object. In other words, as a grammatical cat­egory, Voice shows the relation between the action and its subject, namely, it indicates whether the action is performed by the subject or passes on to it. As a result, Voice […]

Verbal Category of Voice Although a number of criteria to differentiate between a simple predicate expressed by a verb in Passive and a compound nominal predicate have been put forward, yet this question is disputable. The identical form and absence of precise distinction of categorical meaning (passive meaning as an action performed on the subject […]

Perfective and Imperfective Aspect In English three main time divisions (present, past and future) are con­veyed by fourteen verbal forms. The existence of the fourteen forms may be explained only by some additional meanings peculiar to these forms be­cause in the majority of cases their time reference coincides (cf. He has beentranslating – He has […]

Verb: Perfective and Imperfective Aspect – Part 1 Having clarified the difference between habituality and iterativity, we may now turn to the definition of habituality itself. The feature that is com­mon to habituality is that its means describe a situation which is character­istic of an extended period of time, so extended that the situation referred […]

Verb: Perfective and Imperfective Aspect – Part 1 Verb: Perfective and Imperfective Aspect – Part 2 Definitions of progressiveness found in some traditional grammars, along the lines of describing a situation in progress, often fail to bring out the difference between progressiveness and imperfectivity. So, in what does progressiveness differ from imperfectivity? Firstly, imperfectivity includes […]

Verb: Perfective and Imperfective Aspect – Part 1 Verb: Perfective and Imperfective Aspect – Part 2 Verb: Perfective and Imperfective Aspect – Part 3 In addition to this, the Progressive in English has a number of other specific uses that do not seem to fit under the general definition of progres­siveness, for instance in I’ve […]

The Perfect in English is rather different from the aspects, since it tells us nothing directly about the situation in itself, but rather relates some state to a preceding situation. As a preliminary illustration of this, we may con­trast the English sentences I have lost (Perfect) my gloves and I lost (non-Perfect) my gloves. One […]