Grammatical Category of Aspect

Aspect is a verbal grammatical category showing the way in which the action develops. The modern English aspect based on the contrast of continuous and non-continuous forms begins to take root in the Middle English period. The continuous aspect goes back to the Old English free phrase beonjwesan + Participle Г.

The problem of aspect in Modern English admits of four interpreta­tions:

1. aspect is a semantic category;

2. there is no category of aspect in Modern English;

3. the category of aspect is closely connected with the category of tense and cannot be severed from it;

4. the category of aspect is a specific grammatical category.

1) The semantic classification of aspects in English is carried out by G. Curme who finds it possible to single out five aspects:

-the durative aspect representing the action as continuing, e.g.: Mother is baking a cake now (V. Evans);

-the ingressive aspect directing the attention to the initial stage of the action or state, e.g.: She began crying (A. S. Hornby, A. P. Cowie, A. C. Gimson);

-the effective aspect directing the attention to the final point of the activity or state, e.g.: We stopped talking (ibid);

- the terminative aspect indicating an action as a whole, e.g.: She read about the murder in the paper (Longman Dictionary of Con­temporary English);

-the iterative aspect naming a succession of like acts, e.g.: When we were children, we would go skating every week (M. Swan). He pooh-poohs of everything (G. Curme).

The grammatical category of aspect, like any grammatical category, should have constant grammatical forms of its expression. In G. Curme's classification, it is only the durative and the terminative aspects that can be looked upon as grammatical aspects since to express the durative as­pect we usually employ the ///g-form, and the terminative aspect is gen­erally associated with the base of the verb. As for the so-called iterative, ingressive, and effective aspects, they cannot be referred to the grammati­cal category of aspect because they lack constant grammatical forms of their expression.

2. H. Sweet and O.Jespersen deny the existence of the category of as­pect altogether. They look upon continuous forms as tense forms. If it were so, continuous forms would represent a unity of two tenses: present and continuous in present continuous, past and continuous in past con­tinuous, future and continuous in future continuous. But we know that no grammatical form exists that could combine in itself two meanings of the same grammatical category.

3. V.N. Zhigadlo, I.P. Ivanova, L.L. Iofik and some other linguists think that the category of aspect forms an inseparable whole with the category of tense. The majority of linguists, however, are of opinion that although the grammatical categories of aspect and tense are interrelated, they can and should be separated for linguistic analysis because they characterize the verbal action from different angles: tense refers the action to this or that time sphere, aspect describes the manner in which the action de­velops in this time sphere.

4. The majority of linguists speak of two aspects in Modern English: continuous and nоn-continuous (or common). The continu­ous aspect is marked both in form {'be + Participle I) and in meaning (it represents an action in its development). The non-continuous aspect is unmarked both in form (no characteristic pattern 'be + Participle I) and in meaning (it represents an action as simply occurring with no ref­erence to its duration).

As is well known, not every verb is commonly used in the form "be+ Participle I". Verbs denoting abstract relations such as "belong" and the verbs denoting sense of perception or emotion such as "see, hear, hope, love", seldom appear in the form.

Thus, the verbs "see, hope, like, fear" and others, denoting perception or feelings (emotions) may be found in this form. E.g. It was as if she were seeing herself for the first time in a year. The form "be+ Participle I" is very appropriate here as it does not admit of the action being interpreted as momentaneous and makes it absolutely clear that what is meant is a sense perception going on for some time.