2. The verb. The category of aspect.

The term “aspect” came to Germanic lang-s from Slavonic ones. Rus. grammar-s used to distinguish quite a number of aspects such as – зачинительный (побежать,запеть), завершительный (дочитать), дуративный (сидеть,думать), моментальный (вздрогнуть,вскочить), прерывчатый (хохотать,барабанить), дистрибутивный (захаживать,поглядывать).

By the analogy of the rus. aspects old Brit. gramm-s also distinguished the following aspects in English.

1. The inchoative aspect (to begin, to start, to fall in love),

2. the terminative aspect (stop, finish, graduate),

3. the durative (continue, proceed, go on, keep),

4. the iterative (chew, walk),

5. the momentary (glance, jump).

Due to this old approach the definition of the category of aspect ran as follows: the cat. of aspect expresses the way the action takes place or develops in time.

Swedish gr-n Agrel suggested calling this cat-ry the semantic cat. of the manner of action. Many modern gr-ans distinguish 2 gram.aspects in Rus.: the interminative (несовер.) & terminative (соверш.) – сидеть - сеcть.

Brit.gram-ns also try to distinguish 2 aspects in Engl.: the interminative aspect expressed by such unlimitive verbs as to sit, to love, to think & the terminative aspect expressed by limitive verbs to come, to give a cry, to break. But this approach was criticized by Deutchbein. He said that the meanings of limitiveness & unlimitiveness are included into the lexical meanings of verbs; they’re not expressed gram-ly, that’s why this category which is built on the opposition of the mean-gs of limitiveness & unlimitiveness are called the lexico-gram.category of the aspective character of the verb.

Modern Brit. gram-ns used to distinguish 2 indisputable aspects in Eng.: the indefinite aspect which is unmarked member of the opposition & the continuous aspect which is marked by be + ing.

The gram-s definition of the cat. of aspect runs as follows: the cat. of aspect expresses by the gram. form of the verb whether the action has reacted its virtual limits or whether it has’t.

The perfect forms were the object of many disputes & there’re the following treatment of them:

1) the perfect forms are the forms of the cat. of tense (Jesperson),

2) they’re forms of the cat. of time correlation ( Smirnitskii),

3) they’re the forms of the cat. of retrospective coordination (Blokh),

4) they’re the forms of the cat. of taxis (Achmanova),

5) they’re the forms of the cat. of phase,

6) they’re the forms of the cat. of aspect (Prof. Voroncova calls it the cat. of transmissive aspect (переемственный вид).

The cat. of aspect is built up of by the opposition of 4 aspect forms: those of the indefinite, continuous, perfect & perfect continuous aspect.

3. The Verb. The category of Voice (cv).

Voice is the a gram. categorv which reflects the objective philosophic categories of coarse & consequence. I) It expresses the relations b/n the subject of the action & the action itself: 2) It expresses the relations b/n the subject & the object of the action: 3) It expresses the centrifugality & centripitality. The CV is a regular expression by the form of the verb of the correlation b/n the units of semantic & syntactic levels. There are 2 generally excepted voices in Eng.: the active, the passive voices. The active voice(AV) is the unmarked member of the opposition; the passive voice(PV) is the marked one, expressed analytically by the form "be+Part.II". When the semantic object is put as the subject of a sentence & its theme, the speaker has to change the form of the verb into the passi ve one to avoid misunderstanding of the meaning of the sentence. F.e., The boy is drawing a picture The picture is drawn by the boy - syntactic level; semantic level: the boy, the picture -sem.subject; is drawing, is drawn -causative action; a picture, by the boy - sem.object. The form is built of transitive verbs. But the form"be+Part.II" doesn't always express the meaning of the PV (to be sitted, to be mistaken). When "be +Part.II" expresses a dynamic action, it's treated as the form of the PV (The car has been broken). When it expresses a state after an action it's treated as a compound nominal predicate. There are special lang.means which help us to distinguish, the PV from the nominal constructions.They are: 1) the preposition by indicating the doer of the action: 2) adverbial modifiers of time, place: 3) the usage of the passive form in the continuous & perfect aspect forms. Not all the active forms of the verb express the active meaning. They are active in forms, but passive in meaning (He received a letter: He has a toothache:The book sells well). Besides the AV & PV some gram-s distinguish 3 more voices of Eng.:1) the reflexive voice (He dressed himself): 2) the reciprocal (They greeted each other): 3) the middle voice (The door opened). But there are certain gram. reasons which prevent us from accepting such constructions as analytical forms of the cat. of voice. Haimovich. Rogovskaya bring the fol.arguments against treating reflexive, reciprocal const-s as analytical forms of voice: 1)In cases like "He washed himself, it's not the verb that is reflexive, but the pronoun "himself' which is used as a direct object. Auxiliary verbs never perform any syntactical functions.2) "Washed" & "himself' are words belonging to dif. lexemes & having dif.lexical, gram.meanings dif.syntactical functions.3)If such a construction is an analytical word-form, we have to admit that the verb has the categories of the gender or person, non-person & the categories of number & person are expressed twice which runs counter to the law of economy in lang. (He washes himself; She washes herself). 4) A number of verbs can express the reciprocal, reflexive meanings without a corresponding pronoun (In the morning he washed, shade & had breakfast). Similar objections can be raised against the reciprocal voice. As for the middlc voice which is presented by the constructions (The books are selling well: The cutlets looked better than they ate). There may be 3 treatments of such a usage of verbs:1)the verb "sell" in "He sells books"&"The book sells well" are dif.verbs - transitive, intransitive ones; 2) in both cases the verb "sell" is one & the same verb. The difference of the 2 usages is voice-distinctive: 3) the meaning of the middle voice is expressed synt-ly by means of a meaningful dropping out of the syntactical object of the transitive verb. The functional semantic field of passivity: 1) nuclear-"be+Part.II": 2) lexico-syntactical periphery-syntactical constr-s as "to fall into contempt","to fall into suspicion","to be under study"; passive aftercausatives as"to have one’s hair cut", "to have one's car repaired": 3) lexical periphery (to receive, to get, to have, to suffer, to have a toothache) The usage of the PV in Eng. is set to be more frequent than in Rus. It's accounted for by the relatively strict word order in Eng & by the lack of a very well developed system of cases as in Russian.