Morphological classifications

Lecture 4

The Verb: General.

The Categories of Person, Number, Tense, Aspect and Temporal Correlation

1. A general outline of the verb as a part of speech.

2. Classification of verbs.

3. The category of person.

4. The category of number.

5. The category of tense.

6. The category of aspect.

7. Non-finite forms of the verb. (Verbals)

A General Outline of the Verb as a Part of Speech

The verbis a lexico-grammatical class of words, having the categorial meaning of process presented dynamically, developing in time.

The verb is the most complex part of speech. This is due to the central role it performs in realizing predication - connection between the situation given in the utterance and reality. That is why the verb is of primary informative significance in the utterance. Besides, the verb possesses a lot of grammatical categories. Furthermore, within the class of verbs various subclass divisions based on different principles of classification can be found.

Semantic features of the verb. The verb possesses the grammatical meaning of verbiality - the ability to denote a process developing in time. This meaning is inherent (присущий) not only in the verbs denoting processes, but also in those denoting states, forms of existence, evaluations, etc.

Morphological features of the verb. The verb possesses the following grammatical categories: tense, aspect, voice, mood, person, number, finitude and temporal correlation. The common categories for finite and non-finite forms are voice, aspect, temporal correlation and finitude. The grammatical categories of the English verb find their expression in both synthetical and analytical forms.

Syntactic features. The most universal syntactic feature of verbs is their ability to be modified by adverbs. The second important syntactic criterion is the ability of the verb to perform the syntactic function of the predicate. However, this criterion is not absolute because only finite forms can perform this function while non-finite forms can be used in any function but predicate.

Classification of Verbs

Morphological classifications

1. According to their stem-types all verbs fall into: simple (to play), sound-replacive (food - to feed, blood - to bleed), stress-replacive (‘insult - to in’sult, ‘record - to re’cord), expanded - built with the help of suffixes and prefixes (oversleep, undergo), composite - correspond to composite nouns (to blackmail), phrasal (to have a smoke, to take a look).

2. According to the way of forming past tenses and Participle II verbs can be regular and irregular.

Lexical-morphological classificationis based on the implicit grammatical meanings of the verb.

According to the implicit grammatical meaning of transitivity/intransitivity verbs fall into transitive and intransitive.

According to the implicit grammatical meaning of stativeness/nonstativeness verbs fall into stative and dynamic.

Dynamic verbs include:

1) activity verbs: beg, call, drink;

2) process verbs: grow, widen, narrow;

3) verbs of bodily sensations: hurt, itch;

4) transitional event verbs: die, fall;

5) momentary: hit, kick, nod.

Stative verbs include:

1) verbs of inert perception and cognition: adore, hate, love;

2) relational verbs: consist, cost, have, owe.

According to the implicit grammatical meaning of terminativeness/nonterminativeness verbs fall into terminative and durative. This classification is closely connected with the categories of aspect and temporal correlation.