- •The systemic nature of grammar. The two planes of language: the plane of content and the plane of expression. Two fundamental types of relations of lingual units. Their hierarchical relations.
- •The means employed for building-up member-forms of categorial oppositions. Synthetical and analytical types. The grammatical categories.
- •The category of case. Different approaches to the category of case in English nouns. The range of relational meanings of the English genitive.
- •The category of aspect. The opposition by which the aspective category of development is contrasted. The views on the essence of the perfect forms in modern English.
- •The category of mood. The opposition underlying the category. The problem of the imperative mood. The views on the classification of the subjunctive mood in English.
- •The category of voice, its difference from other verbal categories from the point of its referential qualities. The problem of the reflexive, reciprocal and middle voices.
- •The sentence as a unit of speech. The difference between the sentence and the word. Essential features of the sentence. The nominative function of the sentence.
- •The phrase. Two approaches to the definition of the phrase. Types of phrases. Means of expressing syntactical relations within a phrase.
- •Communicative types of sentences. Speech acts as realization of communicative intentions of the speaker. The three cardinal communicative sentences types. The problem of exclamatory sentences.
- •Actual division of the sentence, its purpose and main components. The formal means of expressing the distinction between the theme and the rheme.
The category of aspect. The opposition by which the aspective category of development is contrasted. The views on the essence of the perfect forms in modern English.
The aspective meaning of the verb reflects the mode of the realization of the process. The opposition of the continuous forms of the verb to the non-continuous represents the aspective category of development. The marked member of the opposition is the continuous. It is built by the auxiliary be plus the Present Participle. The categorial meaning of the Continuous is "action in progress". The unmarked member is the indefinite, which leaves the meaning unspecified. The continuous shows the action in the very process of its realization; the indefinite points it out as a mere fact.
Traditional grammar speaks of 16 tense forms in English but actually there exist only 4 of them. The matter is that when speaking about an action we express its primary characteristics of tense but then it may be necessary to show the character of the development of the action or to compare the action with some other one and then in such cases the primary tense category is modified by some other verb categories such as aspect (continuous or non-continuous), perfect (perfect or non-perfect). So we get complex analytical forms, which express not one category of tense but a number of them. Ex.: If we analyze such forms, as "is reading" we should say that this verb expresses Present Tense and continuous aspect or perfect. Hence the modification of the category of Tense by the category of aspect brings about the appearance of 16 verb forms.
There are verbs in Modern English which are not characterized by the aspective use. They are the so called "never-used-in-the-Continuous" verbs (“to be”, “to have”; verbs of physical perception, of mental perception).
There are numerous meanings of the use of the continuous form of the verb. It can denote an action going on at the moment of speaking, actions states and qualities peculiar to the person at the given moment (You are being rude), habitual recurrent actions, etc.
The Perfect Forms consist in the correlation of the verb “to have” with the Participle 2 of the notional verb. The place of the Perfect in the system of tense forms is a disputable problem. The question is whether we should refer it to the category of tense (Prof. Sweet, Prof. Poutsma) or rather to the category of aspect (Prof. Ilyish, Prof. Vorontsova).
Prof. Smernitsky insists that the Perfect form should by no means be referred to the category of aspect. He conducted a very deep analysis of the Perfect form and suggested to observe it as a category of tense correlation. He underlines that the category of tense correlation is different from the category of tense, because the category of tense concerns a concrete moment of time and the category of tense correlation concerns time as a whole. However, this position is not quite clear, as Prof. Smernitsky in his analysis underlines the meaning of previousness which is typical of the Perfect form, but this meaning is closely connected with the reference to a concrete moment of time.
Prof. Ilyish accepts the theory suggested by Prof. Smernitsky, but he points out that it is very difficult to make out the grammatical meaning of the Perfect form, because it not always expresses previousness and, furthermore, previousness can be expressed not only by the Perfect form. He also adds, that the term “category of time correlation” is not suitable, as it brings the Perfect closer to the category of time (suggests “category of correlation”).