5. The Category of Aspect

The category of aspect is a linguistic representation of the objective category of Manner of Action. It is realized through the opposition Continuous::Non-Continuous (Progressive::Non-Progressive). The realization of the category of aspect is closely connected with the lexical meaning of verbs.

There are some verbs in English that do not normally occur with progressive aspect, even in those contexts in which the majority of verbs necessarily take the progressive form. Among the so-called ‘non-progressive’ verbs are think, understand, know, hate, love, see, taste, feel, possess, own, etc. The most striking characteristic that they have in common is the fact that they are ‘stative’ - they refer to a state of affairs, rather than to an action, event or process. It should be observed, however, that all the ‘non-¬progressive' verbs take the progressive aspect under particular circumstances. As the result of internal transposition verbs of non-progressive nature can be found in the Continuous form: Now I'm knowing you. Generally speaking the Continuous form has at least two semantic features - duration (the action is always in progress) and definiteness (the action is always limited to a definite point or period of time). In other words, the purpose of the Continuous form is to serve as a frame which makes the process of the action more concrete and isolated.

The complex sentence. Types of subordinate clauses.

In complex sentences, on the other hand, the clauses are not on an equal footing. In the simplest case, that of a complex sentence consisting of two clauses only, one of these is the main clause, and the other a subordinate clause, that is, it stands beneath the main clause in rank. Of course, there may be more than one main clause and more than one subordinate clause in a complex sentence. (when he came, she was watching tv)

There is much more to be said about the complex sentence than about the compound. This is due to several causes, which are, however, connected with one another.

For one thing, the semantic relations which can be expressed by subordination are much more numerous and more varied than with co-ordination: all such relations as time, place, concession, purpose, etc. are expressly stated in complex sentences only.

Then again, the means of expressing subordination are much more numerous. There is here a great variety of conjunctions: when, after, before, while, till, until, though, although, that, as, because, since; a number of phrases performing the same function: as soon as, as long as, so long as, notwithstanding that, in order that, according as, etc. Besides, a certain number of conjunctive words are used: the relative pronouns who, which, that, whoever, whatever, whichever, and the relative adverbs where, how, whenever, wherever, however, why, etc.

TYPES OF SUBORDINATE CLAUSES

We define a complex sentence as a sentence containing at least one subordinate clause. Any classification of complex sentences is therefore bound to be based on a classification of subordinate clauses. The problem of classifying subordinate clauses is one of the vexed questions of syntactic theory. Several systems have been tried out at various times, and practically each of them has been shown to suffer from some drawback or other.

There remains now the classification of subordinate clauses based on the similarity of their functions with those of parts of the sentence, namely the classification of clauses into:

subject,

predicative,

object,

attributive,

adverbial,

appositional,

and parenthetical clauses.

In this way the general parallelism between parts of a simple sentence and subordinate clauses within a complex sentence will be kept up; however, there is no sufficient ground for believing that there will be complete parallelism in all respects and all details: on the contrary, it is most likely that differences between the two will emerge (especially in the sphere of adverbial modifiers and adverbial clauses). Subordinate clauses may well be expected to have some peculiarities distinguishing them from parts of a simple sentence.