Structural types and morphological classes of verbs.

Classifications of English verbs

According to different principles of classification, classifications can be morphological, lexical-morphological, syntactical and functional.

A. Morphological classifications..
I. According to their stem-types all verbs fall into: simple ( to go), sound-replacive (food - to feed, blood - to bleed), stress-replacive (import - to import, transport - to transport, expanded (with the help of suffixes and prefixes): cultivate, justify, overcome, composite (correspond to composite nouns): to blackmail), phrasal: to have a smoke, to give a smile (they always have an ordinary verb as an equivalent). 2.According to the way of forming past tenses and Participle II verbs can be regular and irregular.

B. Lexical-morphological classification is based on the implicit grammatical meanings of the verb. According to the implicit grammatical meaning of transitivity/intransitivity verbs fall into transitive and intransitive. According to the implicit grammatical meaning of stativeness/non-stativeness verbs fall into stative and dynamic. According to the implicit grammatical meaning of terminativeness/non-terminativeness verbs fall into terminative and durative. This classification is closely connected with the categories of Aspect and Phase.

C. Syntactic classifications. According to the nature of predication (primary and secondary) all verbs fall into finite and non-finite. According to syntagmatic properties (valency) verbs can be of obligatory and optional valency, and thus they may have some directionality or be devoid of any directionality. In this way, verbs fall into the verbs of directed (to see, to take, etc.) and non-directed action (to arrive, to drizzle, etc.):

Syntagmatic classification of English verbs (according to prof. G. Pocheptsov)

D. Functional classification. According to their functional significance verbs can be notional (with the full lexical meaning), semi-notional (modal verbs, link-verbs), auxiliaries.

 

Modal verbs.

 

The distinction between modal words and adverbs is based on two criteria: 1. Their meaning: modal words express the speaker’s attitude to reality of the action expressed in the sentence, 2. Their syntactical function: they are not adverbial modifiers, but parenthesis.

They can be classified into groups according to their meaning: expressing certainty, such as certainly, surely, undoubtedly; those expressing doubt, such as perhaps, maybe, possibly, etc.

If the modal word in the sentence is eliminated, the whole thought will lose the modal colouring and will appear to be stated as a fact, without any specific mention of the speaker’s attitude: She is a delicate little thing, perhaps nobody but me knows how delicate.

A modal word can also make up a sentence by itself. This happens when it is used to answer a general question: Certainly., Perhaps., Maybe. Certainly, I am.

The problem of modal words is connected with the very difficult problem of modality as a whole.

parenthesis – вводные слова

 

 

Non-finite verbs.

Verb: Non – finite verbs. Verbids are the forms of the verb intermediary in many of their lexico-grammatical features between the verb and the non-processual parts of speech. The processual meaning is exposed by them in a substantive or adjectival-adverbial interpretation: they render processes as peculiar kinds of substances and properties. They are formed by special morphemic elements which do not express either grammatical time or mood.Their essential syntactic functions, directed by this relational semantics, unquestionably reveal the property which may be called, in a manner of explanation, "verbality", and the statement of which is corroborated by the peculiar combinability character of verbid collocations, namely, by the ability of verbids to take adjuncts expressing the immediate recipients, attendants, and addressees of the process inherently conveyed by each verbid denotation.The differential feature of the opposition is constituted by the expression of verbal time and mood: while the time-mood grammatical signification characterises the finite verb in a way that it underlies its finite predicative function, the verbid has no immediate means of expressing time-mood categorial semantics and therefore presents the weak member of the opposition. The category expressed by this opposition can be called the category of "finitude" The syntactic content of the category of finitude is the expression of predication (more precisely, the expression' of verbal predication).As is known, the verbids, unable to express the predicative meanings of time and mood, still do express the so-called "secondary" or "potential" predication, forming syntactic complexes directly related to certain types of subordinate clauses. The English verbids include four forms distinctly differing from one another within the general verbid system: the infinitive, the gerund, the present participle, and the past participle. The infinitive is the non-finite form of the verb which combines the properties of the verb with those of the noun, serving as the verbal name of a process. The infinitive is used in three fundamentally different types of functions: first, as a notional, self-positional syntactic part of the sentence; second, as the notional constituent of a complex verbal predicate built up around a predicator verb; third, as the notional constituent of a finite conjugation form of the verb. The first use is grammatically "free", the second is grammatically "half-free", the third is grammatically "bound".The English infinitive exists in two presentation forms. One of them, characteristic of the free uses of the infinitive, is distinguished by the pre-positional marker to. The other form, characteristic of the bound uses of the infinitive, does not employ the marker to, thereby presenting the infinitive in the shape of the pure verb stem, which in modern interpretation is understood as the zero-suffixed form. This form is called traditionally the "bare infinitive", or in more recent linguistic works, respectively, the "unmarked infinitive". The gerund is the non-finite form of the verb which, like the infinitive, combines the properties of the verb with those of the noun. Similar to the infinitive, the gerund serves as the verbal name of a process, but its substantive quality is more strongly pronounced than that of the infinitive. The present participle is the non-finite form of the verb which combines the properties of the verb with those of the adjective and adverb, serving as the qualifying-processual name. In its outer form the present participle is wholly homonymous with the gerund, ending in the suffix -ing and distinguishing the same grammatical categories of retrospective coordination and voice. The past participle is the non-finite form of the verb which combines the properties of the verb with those of the adjective, serving as the qualifying-processual name. The past participle is a single form, having no paradigm of its own.