5. Category of Mood
A great divergence of opinions on the question of the category of mood is caused by the fact that identical mood forms can express different meanings and different forms can express similar meanings.
The category of mood shows the relation of the nominative content of the sentence towards reality. By this category the action can be presented as real, non-real, desirable, recommended, etc.
It is obvious that the opposition of the one integral form of the indicative and the one integral form of the subjunctive underlies the unity of the whole system of English moods. The formal mark of this opposition is the tense-retrospect shift in the subjunctive, the latter being the strong member of the opposition. The shift consists in the perfect aspect being opposed to the imperfect aspect, both turned into the relative substitutes for the absolutive past and present tenses of the indicative.
The study of the English mood reveals a certain correlation of its formal and semantic features. The subjunctive, the integral mood of unreality, presents the two sets of forms according to the structural
division of verbal tenses into the present and the past. These form-sets constitute the two corresponding functional subsystems of the subjunctive, namely, the spective, the mood of attitudes, and the conditional, the mood of appraising causal-conditional relations of processes. Each of these, in its turn, falls into two systemic subsets, so that at the immediately working level of presentation we have the four subjunctive form-types identified on the basis of the strict correlation between their structure and their function: the pure spective, the modal spective, the stipulative conditional, the consective conditional:
The elaborated scheme clearly shows that the so-called "imperative mood" has historically coincided with Subjunctive 1
The described system is not finished in terms of the historical development of language; on the contrary, it is in the state of making and change. Its actual manifestations are complicated by neutralizations of formal and semantic contrasts, by fluctuating uses of the auxiliaries, of the finite "be" in the singular.
Today scholars discuss different classifications of moods in English revealing new correlations of meaning and form in the process of expressing mood distinctions but so far a universally accepted system of moods has not been worked out. Hence our task in the objective study of language, as well as in language teaching, is to accurately register these phenomena, to explain their mechanism and systemic implications, to show the relevant tendencies of usage in terms of varying syntactic environments, topical contexts, stylistic preferences.
11.The Infinitive
The infinitive combines the properties of the verb with those of the noun, as a result it serves as the verbal name of a process. By virtue of its general process-naming function, the infinitive should be considered as the head-form of the whole paradigm of the verb.
The infinitive has a dual, verb-type and noun-type, valency. The infinitive has three grammatical categories: the aspective category of development (the opposition of Continuous and Non-Continuous forms), the aspective category of retrospective coordination (the opposition of Perfect and Non-Perfect forms), the category of voice (the opposition of Passive and Non-Passive forms). Consequently, the categorial paradigm of the infinitive of the objective verb includes eight forms: the Indefinite Active, the Continuous Active, the Perfect Active, the Perfect Continuous Active; the Indefinite Passive, the Continuous Passive, the Perfect Passive, the Perfect Continuous Passive. The infinitive paradigm of the non-objective verb, correspondingly, includes four forms.