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Home , English subjunctive, Grammatical aspect

How Work by Felicia Jean Steele

We generally expect that we know all there is to know about the “parts of speech” we learned through Grammar Rock and Mad Libs: nouns, , verbs, , prepositions, and conjunctions. When we complete a Mad Libs, we happily fill in the blanks with present and verbs without blinking an eye. When the game asks us to provide a past tense , we generally fill it in with a simple -ed form of a verb, such as “loved, walked, acted.” If we're feeling saucy, we'll use one of the “irregular” verbs: “swam, wrote, ran.” In both cases, we use past tense forms to signify actions or states we have performed or experienced in a time prior to our present moment. In the simplest possible terms, English only changes the form of verbs to indicate a change from present to past time. As a result, linguists say that English has two tenses: present and past. Tense, or the time of action or state, isn't the only quality that verbs reflect. Verbs also reflect their mood, , and aspect. In some , these properties are represented by adding an affix ( or ) to actual word. In English, when a speaker uses the —the mood of commands—there is no difference in the shape or sound of the word than if they were using the first- person form in the indicative mood—used in everyday . A teacher raises her voice and says, “Listen!” She says, “Listen!” whether she's speaking to one student or many; this word sounds and looks exactly the same as it would if she were saying “I listen to music every evening.” By , a magister (teacher) would command one student with the following: “Audī!” He'd yell “Audīte” to a group of students. In Latin, speakers add either an -ī or -īte to indicate the imperative mood. Most Indo-European languages (one of which is English) preserve three moods: indicative, imperative, and subjunctive. Linguists also recognize a number of other moods, including optative, conditional, and interrogative, but few languages have (those and affixes mentioned above) to indicate them. Most languages, including English, reflect these moods periphrastically—by means of multiple words assembled in a string. English also requires periphrastic constructions to express the other two properties of verbs: voice and aspect. Composition teachers regularly chastise students for overusing the passive voice which is not a form of a single verb but a periphrastic construction comprised of a form of the verb “to be” and the past of the verb that the speaker wants to passivize. The passive voice contrasts with the active voice. The primary difference between the two syntactic constructions has to do with the of the verbs at hand. A verb is called “active” when its subject is the of the action that the verb expresses. One easy way to remember the connection between the “agent” of the verb and the “active voice” is to remember that the two words—agent and active—are cognate, or related, words. In a passive sentence, the subject of the verb is the —or direct —of the verb. Once again, the words passive and patient are cognate with one another. In the following two sentences, we can see the difference between the two syntactic structures:

Active Voice: The dog chased the truck. Passive Voice: The truck was chased by the dog.

In the active sentence, the “dog” is the subject of the sentence and the agent “chased” the patient, “the truck.” In the passive sentence, the subject, “the truck,” is the patient who was “chased.” Since the passive construction requires the verb “to be” in addition to the verb “chase” in its past participial form, it's called a periphrastic (multi-word). Perhaps this would be a good moment to review another grammatical term that seems familiar enough, but which we can't remember thoroughly. Every verb has principle parts: forms that serve speakers as they express different tenses and aspects. Generally speaking, grammarians recognize the 6 following as “principal parts”: the bare , past tense, past participle, and present participle. The past and present are essential to the expression of in English. Although linguists have formulated thorough explanations of aspect, most people are unfamiliar with the term. Many of us learned that English had twelve separate tenses! As we've already discussed, we can't really think about more than two real grammatical tenses: present and past. Grammatical tenses have patterns of inflections (in this case, ) that speakers use to indicate the change in time. The other ten “tenses” that we find in grammar handbooks are really expressions of different aspects working within three time frames: present, past, and future. When we think of aspect, we need to make sure we're thinking about the nature of an action and not the time when it occurred. Some languages can express the nature of an action grammatically using only a single verb form. For example, if you spoke French and wanted to indicate that you performed an action habitually in the past, you would use the “imparfait” (or ) form of the verb. Thus, the sentence, “When I was a child, I used to play in the park,” would be expressed using an “imparfait” aspect in French to indicate that playing was a habitual action in past time. The French translation is: “Quand j'étais enfant, je jouais dans le parc.” The verbs etais and jouais are both conjugated in their imperfect forms, which express habitual actions in the past. While French has an inflectional ending for this particular set of aspectual distinctions, like English it must rely upon periphrastic constructions to express other aspects, such as the perfective. Typically, linguists recognize two clearly delineated aspects in English: progressive and . Using the verb “to read” we can generate present, past, and future progressives with little difficulty:

Present progressive: You are reading this essay. Past progressive: I was reading about aspect before I started writing this essay. Future progressive: You will be reading more about the in this course.

In each of these sentences, the present participle (the -ing) form of the verb “to read” indicates that the action is ongoing in each time frame: present, past, and future. The participle itself does not determine the time of the action, only its nature as an ongoing action. The past participle, by contrast, indicates that actions are complete or “perfect” in each time frame. While progressive forms use the verb “to be” as an that indicates the time frame of the action, perfective forms use the auxiliary “have.” As a result, we can easily distinguish between perfect forms of verbs and their passive counterparts. For example, the two sentences below are distinct in terms of “voice,” even though they both employ the past participle:

Passive voice (): Verbs are written about in this essay. Active voice (): I have written about verbs in this essay.

So although both sentences use the past participle form “written” in their verb , the sentences have radically different meanings: in the first sentence, “verbs” are the subject of the sentence and the topic that readers their attention upon, while, in the second sentence, “I” is both the subject and the focus of readerly attention. Passive sentences can be expressed in a present perfect, but only with the addition of present tense forms of “have” + the past participle of “to be,” “been”: “Verbs have been written about by many people.” Although some readers might interpret the “completed” nature of the action as a result of the passive voice, but it isn't. It is a of the perfect instead. Although the perfect suggests “completed action,” completed actions can exist in all three time frames: present, past, and future tenses. Thus, we can change our earlier “progressive” verbs into “perfects” by replacing “to be” + “present participle” with “to have” + “past participle.”

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Present perfect: You have read about the progressive aspect. Past progressive: You had read about tense before you read about aspect. Future progressive: You will have read much more about verbs before you finish this essay.

Since aspect denotes the nature of an action and not the time in which it has taken place, they can also be combined into more complex forms. Speakers of English can construct perfect progressive forms, which suggest that an an ongoing action with a distinct termination point took place in the present, past, or future time frames. The connotations of the present perfect progressive are somewhat difficult to understand, although the past and progressive are much easier to get a handle on for most speakers. For example, the sentence, “I have been wanting to write a textbook about English for some time,” suggests that the desire to write a textbook began the distant past, has been sustained over time, and will end, presumably when the project comes to fruition. Like the other perfect aspectual forms, the perfect progressive requires the auxiliary “to have” to express tense and a past participle to express the perfect aspect, in this case “been.” In addition, the perfect progressive form adds a present participle to the end of the to suggest that an action is ongoing. Since perfect progressives express complex temporal relationships between actions, they appear largely in narration. The following examples, drawn from the British National Corpus, a searchable collection of 100 million words of (90 % of which are drawn from largely narrative texts), demonstrate how much information perfect progressives can provide to readers or listeners.

Past perfect progressive: Mungo had the impression that he had been waiting a lifetime to answer that question. (The forest of the night. Kelly, Chris. Oxford: OUP, 1991—BNC)

Future perfect progressive (from a London Accountancy report): Of course many companies, particularly in manufacturing industry, will have been using "time and attendance" systems for some time. These can be as basic as manual clocking in and clocking off mechanisms.

Speakers can continue to add complexity to verb phrases, making perfect progressive verb phrases passive. Although possible, these constructions are wildly rare. In fact, not one future perfect progressive passive construction appears in the British National Corpus. Such a sentence would read, “I will have been being taught to play the piano for twenty years by the time I'm thirty.” While no speaker recorded in the corpus has uttered or written such a sentence, it is grammatically possible. The other two tenses, present and past, are attested, although there are only five tokens for the present perfect progressive passive and one for the past tense form. This essay began with a reverie about Latin teachers yelling at their students, yet we quickly moved away from mood. Although English has somewhat limited grammatical resources to express differences in mood, the modal auxiliaries of English provide speakers with a large repertoire for the expression certainty, doubt, expectation, ability, or necessity. Before discussing modal auxiliaries in more detail, we should briefly discuss the indicative, imperative, and subjunctive in Present Day English (PDE). Most of our utterances are in the indicative mood, which is largely descriptive. The speaker takes on a fairly neutral point of voice in the indicative: speakers describe what they see, not what they believe, expect, or propose. In the imperative mood, the mood of commands that we discussed earlier, speakers clearly articulate their expectations of others. In some languages, the expresses contingency, dependency, or doubt. Three sentences side-by-side can illustrate the difference between the three moods:

Indicative mood: This essay is shorter than others on the subject. Imperative mood: Essay, be shorter than others on the subject! Subjunctive mood: If this essay were shorter than others on the subject, I would be pleased. 6

In Present Day English, subjunctive forms have largely disappeared from most verbs. Only one verb still retains subjunctive forms recognizable to speakers of superstandard forms of the language- -”to be”. For example, if I wished to convey the impossibility of my acquiring royal status, I would say, “If I were a king, I would be a beneficent one.” Despite the claim of my generosity to my potential subjects, no one will likely every crown me king. First, I'm female, and women cannot become kings; second, I'm not a member of the royal family of any monarchist country. Therefore, I have used the subjunctive mood to express the impossibility of becoming king. For most speakers, the “if” suggests possibility by itself, so that they see no problem with following it with the indicative verb form, “was.” In the British National Corpus, the subjunctive constructions, “If I were”(561 tokens) and “if it were,” (786 tokens) appear most frequently in legal records, while the more numerous “if I was” (772 tokens) and “if it was” (1854 tokens) appear across text types, documented in oral histories, interviews, fiction, and witness testimony. Outside of conditional , headed with “if,” speakers most frequently express their certainty, doubt, and belief in the necessity of actions by using modal auxiliaries in their sentences. Discussions of the classic example of modal auxiliaries and their fine distinctions in meanings is usually accompanied by unpleasant memories from elementary school. Almost all of us recall asking a teacher, “Can I go to the bathroom?” Only to have the teacher reply, “I don't know. Can you?” While most of us refrained from relieving ourselves in the classroom, all of us were likely confused and impatient with the delay from this unsought grammar lesson. The distinction between “can” and “may” is likely lost on all schoolchildren. Nonetheless, it can be captured if we think of modal verbs as steps in a continuum from complete certainty to uncertain probability. must ought to shall should can could will would may might ______Complete certainty Uncertain Probability

Speakers express complete certainty when they say, “They must be football players,” but probability when they say, “They might be football players.” Nonetheless, the first sentence is still open to two different interpretations. If the speakers uttered the sentence when eleven young men in matching uniforms (complete with helmets) came into view, they used “must” to signify that they made a deduction that resulted in their collective certainty. If, instead, the speakers were a group of high school administrators contemplating a group of under-scheduled male students, they used “must” to suggest that that the students will be compelled to play football. Modality relating to probability is called epistemic modality, while that relating to obligation or permission is called deontic modality. For each , speakers (and listeners) can assign (or interpret) either epistemic or deontic modality for a given sentence. As a result, modal verb constructions in English appear in many contexts where we “do things” with words, as J. L. Austin, a major philosopher of language, would say. When we express our expectations of others, make polite requests, ask for permission, or speculate about things, we use modals more frequently than we do in everyday indicative discourse. Consider these examples:

Simple description: Bartholomew opened the window. Polite request: Bartholomew, could you please open the window? Permission: Would it be okay if I opened the window? Speculation: Bartholomew would have opened the window if it had become too warm.

In effect, modal auxiliaries fill the gap that English has in its verbal system as a result of the degraded moods in English verbal inflections. A discussion of verbs would be incomplete without a discussion of . Verbs are 6 described as transitive when they require a direct object to express their meaning completely. Many historically related words can be distinguished by their differences in transitivity. Consider the following pairs, where the first example is intransitive (not transitive) and the second is transitive:

Intransitive: Ramona sits on a chair. Transitive: Ramona sets a book on the table.

Intransitive: Ramona lies on her couch. Transitive: Ramona lay a book on the table.

The second set of words poses tremendous difficulties for both native and non-native speakers of English, because the past tense form of “to lie” (meaning “to recline”) is identical to the present tense form of the verb “to lay” (meaning “to cause something to recline”). As a result, speakers often confuse the past tense forms of the two verbs and say “I laid on my couch” yesterday, rather than “I lay on my couch,” or they say “I lay a book on the table yesterday,” rather than “I laid the book on the table yesterday.” Transitive verbs can also be distinguished by how many objects they require to be meaningful. Some verbs are considered ditransitive, meaning that they require two objects rather than just one. We usually think of these verbs as requiring a direct and an indirect object. The verb “to give” is one of the classical “ditransitive” verbs. In order to understand the verb “to give” a listener must either know the indirect object of the verb explicitly or be able to infer it from the immediate or discourse context. Consider these two examples:

Explicit indirect object: Barbara gave Paula a book that she really enjoyed. Implicit indirect object: Barbara gave blood today.

In the first example, the indirect object (Paula) follows hard on the heels of the direct object (the book), while in the second sentence, we must infer that the direct object (blood) was received by some legitimate authority through a blood drive, otherwise gruesome implications arise. Some verbs can be characterized as ambitransitive--or alternatively transitive or intransitive depending on the specific sense used. The verb “run” provides a good example.

Intransitive: My husband and daughter run every morning. Transitive: My friend runs a bookstore.

The first sense, which involves the swift up and down movement of the legs that causes an individual to traverse the ground swiftly, has no direct object. It can happen across time or space, but it cannot happen to something. The second sense, synonymous with “operate,” requires a direct object in order to be clear to an interlocutor or listener. Although we tend to think of verbs as single words with single meanings, we must recognize that any given verb expresses the time of an action or state, its essential nature, and the speaker's attitude toward the action or state. Moreover, the qualities of the verb in any given sentence result in constraints on the other phrasal constituents of the sentence, the subjects and objects. In more ways than one, verbs form the core of our communicative system and, as such, the grammatical patterns associated with them are essential to our deep understanding of any given language.

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