Лекция 6. Verb: Categories of Tense, Aspect, Phase The concept of time in different languages. Functional-semantic category of temporality

Time plays a very important role in human life and the concept of time occupies a very important place in the conceptual picture of reality and in the semantic space of language though languages may vary greatly in expressing this concept. In most European languages the expression of time is primarily associated with the grammatical category of tense which includes three grammatical tenses: present, past and future. These three grammatical tenses correspond to the three planes of ontological time. But this rule is not universal. Many non-European languages do not use this time scale. For example, Buzarra, an Australian aboriginal language has one tense form indication for both 'happening now' and 'happened recently' and another form indication 'happened today' and 'happened a long time ago' (Garner). Hopi (язык шошонской подветви юто-ацтекских языков) have a different concept of time - there are no straightforward past, present and future and their language is marked by the overriding grammatical importance of aspect and mood. There are languages (e.g. Burmese) where time does not find a grammatical expression at all (Comrie 1985). There are also languages in which the verb is concerned with spatial rather than temporal relations.

In English, as well as in most European languages, the concept of time finds a very elaborate expression. It is presented by units of various lingual levels: grammatical forms, nouns, adjectives and adverbs of time, prepositions and conjunctions of general temporal semantics, prefixes and word combinations. Taken together they constitute the functional-semantic category of temporality. The centre of this category is taken by the grammatical category of tense in which this concept finds the most specified and regular expression. Besides the grammatical category of tense the concept of time is also represented in two other verbal categories of English: aspect and time correlation.

The problem of the grammatical category of tense (now & then)

The grammatical category of tense is a category which expresses the relation between the time of the action and the moment of speech (now) or any other point of reference taken for the basis of temporal relations (then). Strictly speaking, the word moment in this definition is not very precise as both now and then denote not only points in time but rather stretches of time and the boundaries of these stretches are not clearly outlined (compare the use of present in universal statements like "Experience fades. Memory stills (Ch. Romney-Brown) where the 'now' actually occupies the whole of the time axis, it refers to all times, so time eventually stills in such utterances). The presence of the words now and then in the characteristic of the category suggests that it has a deictic character, the now and then are not stable but shifting because they present the speaker's moment of speech (for this some scholars introduce the term 'the time of communication' to replace the 'the moment of speech' (King 1983). In this respect tense may be compared to the most prototypical deictic words - the pronouns. This fact differentiates the category of tense from the other two verbal categories in which the concept of time also finds its representation - the categories of aspect and time correlation. Only the category of tense has a deictic character. It locates situation in time with reference to the time of communication, the speaker's time. Aspect involves different ways of "viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation" (Comrie), whereas time-correlation places the action on the time axis with reference to its correlation with another action or another indication of time on the time axis as prior to them.