tailieunhanh - The grammar of the english verb phrase part 14

English tense system which was at the same time a scientific study and a work which could be used as a reference grammar by linguists and students of English with a basic knowledge of descriptive linguistics and a fairly advanced proficiency in English. Difficult as it is to reconcile these two purposes with each other, we have attempted to write a grammar that comes up to this double expectation. | 84 1. Introduction a special suffix and or auxiliary of an aspectual meaning that has to do with the way the speaker views the internal temporal structure of a situation. For example a speaker may view a situation as just beginning focusing on the initial part of it ingressive or inchoative aspectual meaning or he may view the situation as a hypersituation which consists of repeated subsituations as in She tapped a few times on the elephant s head. This is iterative or repetitive aspectual meaning. In this work we will refer to the repetition of what is seen as the same situation as iterative or repetitive aspectual meaning even when the repetitions are seen as taking place on different occasions and do not form a hypersituation as in I ve only been in this town three times . Grammatical aspect is the pairing of these meanings with specific forms of the verb. Different aspectual meanings are grammaticalized in different languages. In English although many sorts of aspectual meaning can be expressed by for example aspectual verbs as in It began to rain only two sorts of aspectual meaning are grammaticalized. The first is progressivity. Progressive aspect combines the progressive form be V-ing . It is raining with the meaning focus on the middle part of the situation . The second sort of aspectual meaning that is grammaticalized is habituality . When I was a child my mother would buy chocolate for us every Friday though the expression of grammaticalized habituality is restricted to verb forms involving one of the auxiliaries will would or used to. The third system of the verb phrase introduced in part III is modality. Modality is a semantic category which covers two main areas of meaning. The first has to do with the speaker s assessment of the likelihood of actualization in the past present or future of a situation. This is called epistemic modality since it is concerned with the truth of propositions or utterances. The second has to do with factors .