Categorial meaning of English verbs, their lexical / grammatical subclasses and morphemic structure.

Categorial meaning – dynamic process, process developing in time

Syntactic function – predicate

The Grammatical Categories of the English Verb:

§ Person and number

§ Aspect

§ Tense

§ Voice

§ Mood

Subclasses of verbs:

Notional

§ Have full nominative value

§ Comprise an open class of words

(Semi)functional

§ Have partial nominative value

§ Comprise a close class of words

 NOTIONAL VERBS

1) ACTIONAL -Denote the action of the active doer

Physical -to write, to fight, to help

Mental -To calculate, to compare

Perceptual- To look, to listen, to smell

2) STATAL -Denote the action of the inactive experiencer

Physical- to ripen, to deteriorate

Mental - to understand, to forget

Perceptual - to see, to hear, to smell

The aspect features of verbal semantics:

· durative / continual : continue, linger, last, live, exist

· Iterative / repeated: reconsider, return

· terminate / concluded: terminate, finish, end, close

· interminate / non-concluded: live, study, think

· instantaneous / momentary: burst, click, drop, fall

· ingressive / starting: begin, start, resume

· supercompleted : outgun, oversimplify

· undercompleted: underestimate, undersleep

The combinatory potential of the verb:

· Transitive verbs take a prepositionless complement (the direct object)

· Objective verbs combine both with the subject and the object

· Intransitive verbs usually cannot take the direct object

· Subjective verbs are connected to the subject only

(SEMI)FUNCTIONAL VERBS

-AUXILIARIES - build analytical forms of the notional verbs

-MODALS - denote subject attitudes to the action

-VERBID INTRODUCERS - introduce non-finite forms of the verb into the structure of the sentence

-COPULAS - connect the nominative part of the predicate to the subject

English verbal tense forms: 4 verbal tense forms: the present, the past , the future, and the future-in-the-past .

Morphological categories of English verbs.

According to different principles of classification, classifications can be morphological, lexical-morphological, syntactical and functional.

A. Morphological classifications..
I. According to their stem-types all verbs fall into: simple (to go),sound-replacive (food - to feed, blood - to bleed), stress-replacive (import - to import, transport - to transport, expanded (with the help of suffixes and prefixes): cultivate, justify, overcome, composite (correspond to composite nouns): to blackmail), phrasal: to have a smoke, to give a smile (they always have an ordinary verb as an equivalent). 2.According to the way of forming past tenses and Participle II verbs can be regularand irregular.

B. Lexical-morphological classification is based on the implicit grammatical meanings of the verb. According to the implicit grammatical meaning of transitivity/intransitivity verbs fall into transitive andintransitive. According to the implicit grammatical meaning of stativeness/non-stativeness verbs fall into stative and dynamic. According to the implicit grammatical meaning of terminativeness/non-terminativeness verbs fall into terminative and durative. This classification is closely connected with the categories of Aspect and Phase.

 

Status of future tense in English.

The future tense forms:

§ Express relative time – posteriority in relation to either the present or the past:

§ 1) as an after-event in relation to the present: He will work tomorrow (not right now)

§ 2) as an after-event in relation to the past: He said he would work the next day.

Status of shall / will, should / would:

O. Jespersen and L.S. Barkhudarov, state that shall/will, should/ would are modals denoting intention, command, request, promise, etc. in a weakened form, e.g.: I’ll go there by train. = I intend (want, plan) to go there by train. On this basis they deny the existence of the verbal future tense in English.

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