XVII. Verb. The categories of tense, aspect and time correlation.

Tense is the grammatical expression of verbal time. It is affected in two stages. The first is the opposition of the past tense to the present tense. The marked member of the opposition is the past form. At the second stage the forms of the future tense are opposed to the forms of no future marking.

Jill returns form her driving class at 5 o’clock. – At five Jill returned from her driving class. I know that Jill will return from her driving class at 5 o’clock. – I knew that at five Jill would return from her driving class.

The tense system is marked by the do-forms in the simple aspect in the past and present.

The prospective time category (future-non-future) is neutralized in certain uses: the use of “going to” with the future meaning, expressing future action which takes place according to some plan or arrangement, and some others: The government meets in emergency session today over the matter of continued violations of the cease-fire.

If things turn out as has been arranged, the triumph will be all ours.

I repeated my request to notify me at once whenever the messenger arrived.

The category of tense is closely connected with the category of aspect. The aspective meaning of the verb, as different from its temporal meaning, reflects the inherent mode of the realization of the process irrespective of its timing. This is true about the opposition of continuous-non-continuous forms, as they reflect the character of the process, irrespective of its timing.

The plane touched the ground. – The plane was touching the ground when we arrived at the airport.

Together with the tense, aspect makes a form, characteristic of usage of every verb – the aspect-tense form. Present simple means the regular action and has a synthetic form – the opposition of the third person singular against all the rest, and an analytical form – do + inf – in negative sentences, questions and stylistically marked positive sentences “He does know the truth!” Present continuous denotes actions done at the moment of speech, around this moment, temporary actions and states, future actions, arranged with other people. Transpositionally can be used with “always” in the meaning of the action that happens more often than necessary.

The category of time correlation is one of the interpretations of the perfect aspect. It denotes the priority of the action toanother action or to the moment ofspeaking.The perfect form of a limitive verb denotes reaching a limit: “What you expected has happened.”

If the verb lexically means a change of the state, its perfect will have the meaning of the result: “People have grown more sensitive to the environment.”

Durative verbs in the perfect form have the meaning of the action, terminated at the present moment: “This really has meant something to me, really.

We have always felt that.'

The Present form of Perfect functions mostly in the direct speech.

Aspect forms of the verbs can be expressed only within a certain tense, forms of verbs unite tense and aspect categories. The past prefect forms show the correlation of the action with time in the past, expressed by another action or a direct time marker. Thus, in the past perfect it is the pre-past tense meaning that is more important than the perfect aspect. This is one of the reasons why this category of time correlation is called a category, not just a member of the opposition in the aspect category. “I read the book – He said he had read the book” – they differ not by the category of aspect, but by the pre-past time. The future perfect forms are correlated with a time point in future, it denotes an action as the one which will be completed by this point. It is rarely used in speech:

I'll see you tomorrow night. I shall have thought over your business by then.

The meaning of the perfect continuous forms is another argument in favour of time correlation as a separate category. It explains how both continuous aspect and perfect correlation function together. It shows the process as flowing until it reaches the point of its termination. Limitive verbs in this form denote a repeated action: “Have you been sending me a lot of telegrams?” The Past form is used in the meaning of a prior action; the future form is not used.

To fit the category of time correlation into the aspect system we can speak of the aspect opposition continuous-non-continuous as the aspective category of development.

Glossary of Linguistic Terms

time correlation – временная соотнесенность

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