Tense & Aspect of the verb

The material world exists in time and space and these 2 most important notions are reflected in human thinking and through it in the language.

Ontological time is reflected in language through the speakers presentation. That’s why they say that time of an action in language is represented subjectively through the speaker’s perception. That’s why in language there is strict correlation between the time of action and the moment of speech. The idea of time and language can be expressed in numerous ways: by morphemes (pre-war Russia); words of various classes (now, then, last time, before, after); grammatically (with the help of verbal tense).Ontological time is a one-dimensional time. It can be represented as a linear axes.

On this axes there is chosen the point—“ the moment of speech”. The actions which coincide with the moment of speech belong to the sphere of Present Tenses. The actions which are prior to the moment of speech belong to the Past Tenses. The actions which follow the moment of speech—The Future Tenses.

The grammatical term for naming the forms with temporal meaning is called—“The Tense”.

In every sentence there is its own temporal centre which can be expressed lexically with the help of special adverbial modifiers (E.g. I’m talking to you now. I’ll come tomorrow). Or it can be expressed grammatically through the verbal form itself. (E.g. I study at the university. I have finished my job). In some tense forms the grammatical way of expressing the temporal centre is enough and there is no special need to use adverbial modifier necessarily (E.g. I’ll come and help you. I read a lot. I did it. I have done it. I’m talking to my friend).

Such tenses which can express the temporal centre of the sentence by themselves are called PRIMARY SENTENCES (or contextually-free tenses). They are Present, Past, Future Simple, Present Continues (progressive) and Present Perfect. All the other tenses are called SECONDARY (or contextually-bound tenses) which means that in addition to the verbal tense they all need special adverbial modifiers of time which can be expressed by a single word or a clause of time.

In a complex sentence there appears a problem of sequence of tenses which means that if in the principal clause one of the past tenses is used, it should be followed by a past tense form in a subordinate clause too. For the purposes of sequence of tenses in English the form of the Future-in-the-past was developed deliberately by English grammarians. Still there are some cases when the strict rules of the sequence of tenses are not observed so severely: 1) if in the subordinate clause the idea of the universal truth is expressed (E.g. He knew that the Earth is one of the planets of the Heliocentric system), 2) or if the information of the subordinate clause is not limited by a certain temporal frame (E.g. He said his name is John).

Дата добавления: 2015-10-02