12)The category of person

This category has very few forms of expres­sion in the modem English verb. These forms arc: the -s ending in the 3rd person singular of the Present Indefinite tense. The ending differentiates the 3rd person from the 1st and the 2nd. Besides there are different forms of the verb to be (is, am). The third way of expressing the category of person is the use of auxiliary verbs for different persons (shall, will, should, would- Fu­ture, Future in the Past, conditional mood). Though the category of person has very few forms of expression it is not disappearing and is widely used.

13) The category of number

The category of number shows whether the process is associated with one doer or with more than one doer, e.g. He eats three times a day. The sentence indicates a single eater. The category of number is a two-member opposition: singular and plural. An interesting feature of this category is the fact that it is blended with person: number and person make use of the same morpheme. As person is a feature of the present tense, number is also restricted to the present tense John goes to college. vs. John went to college.

This category has the following forms of expression:

a) The verb to be in the present indefinite tense has for the plural the form are, and for the past indefinite tense plural were.

b) The verb to have for the plural in the present indefinite tense has the form have.

All English verbs with the exception of defective ones have the-.s ending in the 3rd person singular of the present indefinite tense and have no ending in the 3rd person plural of the same tense.

The ending -s- in the 3rd person singular expresses two grammatics categories: The category of person and number and as they are used with the verbs to he and to have which are widely used as notional, semi-notion, auxiliaries, etc. these categories are found in modern English nearly in a: sentence.

Some verbs - modals - do not distinguish number at all.

The analysis of the examples demonstrates the weakness of the English verb as concerns the expression of person and number and its heavy reliance on the subject: it is the subject that is generally responsible for the expression of person and number in English.

14) The category of tense. Six tense-aspect forms

The Category of Tense- is a grammatical category which in the system of grammatical forms expresses the relation of an action to real time i.e. tense is grammatical expression of time. In other words tense as a grammatical category serves to express the time of an action in reference to moment of speech.. Therefore the grammatical category of tense is also of objective character. Thus the grammatical category of tense reflects time relation and an action expressed by a verb may erine-coincide with the moment of speech or it may precede it, or it may follow.

Accordingly there are three grammatical tenses: Present, Past, and Futur

The difference between the lexical and grammatical expression of time lies in the following facts:

1)Lexically it is possible to name any definite moment of the period time. The grammatical meaning of tense is an abstraction from all the tr particular tenses: Present, Past, and Future.

2)Lexically any period of time is named directly (today, tomorrow, yesterday) whereas the grammatical indication of time is of an indirect character; That means that it is not time which is indicated by a verb, but an action the may either coincide with the moment of speech or precede it or follow it.

Some doubts have been expressed about the existence of the Future In definite tense in English. Otto Jespersen denies the existence of the Future tense in English on account of the fact that the verbs shall and will, which are said to be used to build up an analytical form of the Future tense, pre­serve in his opinion their lexical meaning: the verb shall expresses obliga­tion and the verb will expresses volition.

Professor B. Ilyish managed to prove that the reasons which were put forward by 0. Jespersen were not quite convincing. Thus Professor Ilyish shows that very often the context serves to stress the fact that the verbs shall and will may express only grammatical futurity and no modal meaning may be carried, e.g. I am afraid he will have to go there.

The very existence of the combination have to go excludes any possibility of expression of volition because this combination serves to express obligation and therefore the verb will may express only the grammatical meaning of the Future Tense. So the three main divisions of time are represented in the English verbal system by the three tenses and each of them may appear either in the common aspect or in the continuous aspect. Accordingly we have six tense-aspect forms

Present, Past, and Future Tenses of the Common Aspect

The Common aspect represents an action as simply occurring without 'concretising it. actions of a more general, more abstract character referring to the present, past or future time (hence the term indefinite is not quite

happy in connection with past indefinite and future indefinite).

M.A.Ganshina and N.M.Vasilevskaya luckily call these tenses present (or past or future) tense of the common aspect.

Present, Past, and Future Tenses of the Continuous Aspect

The continuous aspect shows a concrete action in its development at a given moment, i.e. it expresses an action going on (continuing) at a given moment present, past, or future or regularly repeated within a given period of time present, past or future.