VII. Verb and its categories
A.I. Smirnitsky was the first to prove that perfect and non-perfect make up a special, self-sufficient, category which he called the "category of time correlation"; this viewpoint is shared now by a vast majority of linguists. Developing A.I. Smirnitsky's views on the categorial semantics of perfect / non-perfect forms, we can come to the conclusion that in English there exist two aspective categories: the category of development (based on the opposition of continuous and non-continuous forms) and the category of retrospective coordination (based on the opposition of perfect and non-perfect forms).
The perfect form has a mixed categorial meaning: it expresses both retrospective time coordination of the process and the connection of the prior action with a time-limit reflected in a subsequent event. The recognition of the two aspect categories also enables one to give a sound interpretation to the perfect continuous forms: they must be treated as forms having marks in both the aspect categories.
The opposition of continuous and non-continuous forms can be neutralized and transponized. Besides, in the category of development verbs which are usually not used in continuous forms can be subjected to the process of reverse transposition, e.g.: Were you wanting my help? As for the opposition of perfect and non-perfect forms, it can undergo only the process of neutralization, transposition being alien to it.
The category of voice occupies a peculiar place in the system of verbal categories because it reflects the direction of the process as regards the participants in the situation denoted by a syntactic construction. The passive form, being marked, expresses the reception of the action by the subject of the syntactic construction; its weak counter- member - the active form - has the meaning of "non-passivity".
In comparison with Russian, the category of voice in English has a much broader representation as not only transitive but also intransitive objective verbs can be used in the passive voice.
Another peculiarity of voice distinctions of English verbs consists in the fact that active forms often convey passive meanings.
A great divergence of opinions on the question of the category of mood is caused by the fact that identical mood forms can express different meanings and different forms can express similar meanings.
The category of mood shows the relation of the nominative content of the sentence towards reality. By this category the action can be presented as real, non-real, desirable, recommended, etc. It is obvious that the opposition of the one integral form of the indicative and the one integral form of the subjunctive underlies the unity of the whole system of English moods. The formal mark of this opposition is the tense-retrospect shift in the subjunctive, the latter being the strong member of the opposition. The shift consists in the perfect aspect being opposed to the imperfect aspect, both turned into the relative substitutes for the absolutive past and present tenses of the indicative.
The study of the English mood reveals a certain correlation of its formal and semantic features. The subjunctive, the integral mood of unreality, presents the two sets of forms according to the structural division of verbal tenses into the present and the past. These form-sets constitute the two corresponding functional subsystems of the subjunctive, namely, the spective, the mood of attitudes, and the conditional, the mood of appraising causal-conditional relations of processes. Each of these, in its turn, falls into two systemic subsets, so that at the immediately working level of presentation we have the four subjunctive form-types identified on the basis of the strict correlation between their structure and their function.
The elaborated scheme clearly shows that the so-called "imperative mood" has historically coincided with Subjunctive 1. The described system is not finished in terms of the historical development of language; on the contrary, it is in the state of making and change. Its actual manifestations are complicated by neutralizations of formal and semantic contrasts, by fluctuating uses of the auxiliaries, of the finite "be" in the singular
. Simple sentence
In traditional linguistics sentences, according to their structure, are divided into simple and composite, the latter consisting of two or more clauses. The typical English simple sentence is built up by one "predicative line" realized as the immediate connection between the subject and the predicate of the sentence. Simple sentences are usually classified into one-member and two- member sentences. This distinction is based on the representation of the main parts of the sentence: sentences having the grammatical subject and the grammatical predicate are termed "two-member" sentences; if sentences have only one of these main parts they are termed "one-member" sentences.
Another structural classification of simple sentences is their classification into complete and elliptical. The language status of the elliptical sentence is a disputable question; many linguists connect the functioning of elliptical sentences with the phenomena of representation and substitution.
The study of the constituent structure of the sentence presupposes the analysis of its parts. Traditionally, scholars distinguish between the main and secondary parts of the sentence. Besides, they single out those parts which stand outside the sentence structure. The two generally recognized main parts of the sentence are the subject and the predicate. To the secondary sentence parts performing modifying functions linguists usually refer object, adverbial modifier, attribute, apposition, predicative, parenthetical enclosure, and addressing enclosure. The description of sentence parts is usually based upon semantic and syntactic criteria and is supplemented by the correlation of sentence parts and parts of speech.
Building up the "model of immediate constituents" is a particular kind of analysis which consists in dividing the sentence into two groups: the subject group and the predicate group, which, in their turn, are divided into their subgroup constituents according to the successive subordinative order of the constituents. The main advantage of the IC-model is that it exposes the binary hierarchical principle of subordinative connection. The widely used version of the IC- model is the "IC-derivation tree". It shows the groupings of sentence constituents by means of branching nodes: the nodes symbolize phrase-categories as unities, while the branches mark their division into constituents.ы