Lecture 1 Fundamentals of grammar

Lecture 4
The Verb: General.
The Categories of Person, Number, Tense, Aspect and Temporal Correlation
1. A general outline of the verb as a part of speech.
2. Classification of verbs.
3. The category of person.
4. The category of number.
5. The category of tense.
6. The category of aspect.
7. The category of temporal correlation.
1. A General Outline of the Verb as a Part of Speech
The verb is the most complex part of speech. This is due to the central role it
performs in realizing predication - connection between the situation given in the
utterance and reality. That is why the verb is of primary informative significance in
the utterance. Besides, the verb possesses a lot of grammatical categories.
Furthermore, within the class of verbs various subclass divisions based on different
principles of classification can be found.
Semantic features of the verb. The verb possesses the grammatical meaning
of verbiality - the ability to denote a process developing in time. This meaning is
inherent not only in the verbs denoting processes, but also in those denoting states,
forms of existence, evaluations, etc.
Morphological features of the verb. The verb possesses the following
grammatical categories: tense, aspect, voice, mood, person, number, finitude and
temporal correlation. The common categories for finite and non-finite forms are
voice, aspect, temporal correlation and finitude. The grammatical categories of the
English verb find their expression in both synthetical and analytical forms.
Syntactic features. The most universal syntactic feature of verbs is their
ability to be modified by adverbs. The second important syntactic criterion is the
ability of the verb to perform the syntactic function of the predicate. However, this
criterion is not absolute because only finite forms can perform this function while
non-finite forms can be used in any function but predicate.