Дипломная работа: Stylistic potential of tense-aspect verbal forms in modern English

In his A Course in Theoretical English Grammar M.Y. Blakh describes and explains the category of retrospective coordination (the perfect aspect) that has been interpreted in linguistic literature in four different ways. In Table 15 «The Perfect Aspect» (The History of the Problem) we present a piece of information about the authors, foreign and native), who presented the perfect aspect as a problem. We present 5 subdivisions according to the ways of the grammatical interpretations:

1. «The tense view».

2. «The aspect view».

3. «The tense-aspect blend view».

4. «The time correlation view».

5. «The strict categorial view» by M.Y. Blokh.

This table is very convenient for students who wants to get post-graduated education and continue their philological observations in the frames of Theoretical English Grammar.

Grammatical material from the textbook written by M.Y. Blokh is very visual and inportant for students. There is no doubt that its numerous particular propeties, as well as its fundamental qualities as a whole, will be further exposed, clarified in the course of continued linguistic research.

I.B. Khlebnikova in her book «Essentials of English Morphlogy» underlines that the items selected for study in this book represent the most debatable parts of English Morphology. It concerns, first of all, the grammatical categories of the verb. The author marks that «the verb is a two-face Janus»: when it is viewed as the carrier of some generalized, abstract grammatical meaning, it belongs to morphology; when it is viewed from the point of view of the position it occupies in relation to different word-classes, it belongs to syntax. Taking into account all these we can find a lot of reasons to present «the third face of our Janus-verb» – stylistic features that are included in our research. The author in chapter IV «The General Organization of Morphlogical Forms» presents «Structural1 Principles of Organization» – The Macrosystem of the English Verb», organized in the table (Table 16) . Being guided by Ukrainian, Russian, American and European linguistic schools – A. Hill, B. Strangle, O. Jespersen, L. Barkhudarov, G. CURME, G.N. Vorontsova and others – I.B. Khlebnikova expoands the characteristic features of an analitical forms of English verb. They are nine. Between them we can find the descriptions of:

- an auxiliary as a verb which has no lexical meaning of its plus infinitive, participle I, II;

- a collocations as indivisible in grammatical sense, though its components are separate words; it is idiomatic in grammar sense;

- auxiliary verbs realized the «present-past» dichotomy:

have done – had done;

is speaking – was speaking;

shall do – should do;

- verb as the whole macrosystem and in the central – microsystem of tense-aspect ;

- the abbreviation of the auxiliary component in colloquial speech:

I’ve done it, and etc.

The author presents the Microsystem and defines that the distinctive features of tense comes first since it is tense, and not aspect, that presents the frame of the system, though opinions may differ on this score (cf.: traditional Russian term «aspect-tense system of Russian verb»).

In her debates with O. Jespersen who denied the existence of future tense as a grammatical tense in English and it was repeated in more modern publications (By Barkhudarov, 1975) the author writes «the most exact approximation of the real, notional time will be the division into past, present and future, if the linguistic material admits such a differentiation ».

The paradigm of tense-aspect in English, from the point of the author's view, is based upon temporal divisions (both proper and relative), forming a frame into which aspect differentiation is included within the range of different temporal points. Special attention was given to perfectnees.

Perfectness is the most enduring and essential category, acting in all microsystems (Table 17).

Describing stylistical features of the present, past and future tenses she marks that the present tense is widely used in narrations taking place within the sphere of the moment of speech, especially in plays and dialogues; «historical present»; permanent qualities, etc. The main sphere of the use of the past tense is the narration in the past, the representation of a chain of events which happened before the present' time. The complete parallelism of the future I and the future 11 and their purely grammatical meaning is exhibited an any contexts. The following sentences can be represented by both future tenses.

e.g.: Then I will drive this pilum through you.

(He said he would drive that pikum through him).

I shall not bother about them.

(He said he would not bother about them).

We would give the descriptions of some terms according to I.B. Khlebnikova:

transposition – the transference of some past actions into the range of the another axis of orientation – the present tense which is the initual point of temporal opposition.