Lecture 9: The category of aspect

Aspect of the verb denotes the kind of action. It is difficult sometimes to distinguish bettween the tense and the aspect, for the two are often combined. Aspect in itself defines the character od action. An action may be considered a single unit, performed at a point of time or it may be considered a continous performance, extending over a period of time. An action may be characterized as repeated, increased,diminished.All these characteristic od action may be considered aspects.

Aspect resembles mood in that it expresses the speaker's or writer's attitude a happening. In English, the primary distinction seems to be between the imperfect and perfect aspects. -a distinction for which we have well-developed device of expression. Other aspects are less well-marked grammaticaly and may be considered aspect-like variants of these two, the iterative (многократный) and inceptive (исходный) being variants of the imperfect.Simple verb forms and verb word groupsending in the verb base do not reveal aspect, or belong to an indefinite aspect. Since the distinction between aspect and tense is somewhat difficult to explain a fanciful analogy may be helpful to use in tense, the happening flows past a fix observer; in aspect, the observer moves round the happening. So aspect indicates something other than time about the verb. it indicates about the beginning, the continuance and the completion of the action of the verb.

Lecture 10: The category of tense and time.

Time is usually called "tense", and the tenses are basically 3: present, past, future. Relative tenses also occur the "pluperfect", indicating time before the past and translatable as HAD DONE so, and the "future perfect" indicating time before the future and translatable as WILL HAVE DONE. The "perfect tense" indicates an action performed before the present, but the implications of which usuallycarry over to the present. It may be translated as have done: Other relative tenses may like-wise be expresssed. Some languages differentiate between the immidiate future, the regular future,the remote future also between past. THe range of possibilities for differentiations of tense is considerrable, particularly when they are combined with the aspect of the action. Tense times a happening with reference to the time of talking or writing about it. If the two times coincide - that is if smth. is happening while we are talking or writing-we have present tense. If the happening ocurred before it is talked or written about, we have past tense. If we talk about smth.that hasn't happeneb but will happen, we hae future or potential tense. The English simple tenses are tenses expressed by simple verbal formal.

Tenses is not the same as time. Tense is a term that we use to identify certain forms that we meet in the syntactic component of the grammar. Time is the semantic component, is the way we think about the progression of existence. Tense is a relatively simple matter,tie is very complex.