14. The verb: Verbals. The adverb

Verbals (infinitive, gerund, and participle) make up a part of the English verb system & have both some features in common with the finite forms and some peculiarities of their own . The English verbals have no category of number, person or mood, but have the categories of aspect, correlation, and voice.

The category of aspect, common and continuous, is typical to the infinitive: to speak-to be speaking.

Correlation appears in all forms of the verb, both finite and non-finite, except the imperative.

Tense is only found in the indicative mood. Since the verbals are hardly ever the predicate of a sentence, they do not express the category of tense in the way the finite verb forms do. It can be said that the opposition between (to) speak - (to) have spoken is based on the category of correlation.The verbals have a distinction between active and passive aspects: (to) read — (to) be read. As they deny the existence of reflexive, reciprocal and middle voices in the finite forms, we must deny it in the verbals. To sum up, all verbals have the catego­ries of correlation and voice: the infinitive, in addition, has the category of aspect. None of the verbals has the categories of tense, mood, person, or number.

The adverb expresses either the degree of a property, or the property of an action, or the circumstances under which an action takes place. Form. Adverbs are invariable. Some of them, however, have degrees of comparison (fast, faster, fastest). In that case, there would be 2 types of degrees of comparison in adverbs:1)the suffix type(faster, fastest); 2) the supplitive type represented, by a few adverbs (well, best). Function: an adverb combines with a verb (run quickly), with an adjective (very long), occasionally with a noun (the then president) and with a phrase (so out of things). An adverb can sometimes follow a preposition (from there) which means that they become partly substantivized. In a sentence an adverb is almost always an adverbial modifier, or part of it (from there), it may be an attribute.

15. Grammatical meaning, classes and categories

GM is a general abstract meaning which unites classes of forms or words & finds its expression through formal markers thus placing a linguistic unit in a grammatical category or a gr.class. Grammatical meanings are very abstract, very general.

The grammatical form unites a whole class of words, so that each word of the class expresses the corresponding grammatical meaning together with its individual, concrete semantics.

Gr. category- a system of expressing a generalized gr. m-g by means of paradigmatic correlation of gr. forms. The set of gr. forms expressing a categorical function constitutes a paradigm. The paradigmatic correlations of gr. forms in a category form “gr. oppositions”. the gr. categories can be innate for a given class (immanent) or only be expressed on the surface of it (reflective).Gr. cat-s can be constant (unchangeable - the cat. of gender); variable (changeable- degrees of comparison).

The words, depending on var. formal and semantic features are divided into gr. classes (parts of speech). P. of sp. are discriminated on the basis of 3 criteria: “semantic” (the evaluation of the generalized m-g); “formal” (represents the specific inflexional and word-building features of all the lexemic subsets of a p. of sp.); “functional” (syntac. role in the sentence typical for a p.of sp.)

Notional (noun, adj., numeral, pron-n, verb, adv)- words of complete nominal meaning characterised by self-dependent functions in the sent. Functional (the article, prep., conj., particle, modal w-d, interjection)- words of incomplete nomin. meaning and non-self-dependent func-s in the sent.; unchangeable words. Each p. of sp. is further subdivided into subseries. Eg. N: proper and common; animate and inanimate; countable and uncountable; concrete and abstract, etc. V: fully and partially predicative; transitive and intran.; actional and statal; purely nominative and evaluative, etc.