THE CATEGORY OF MOOD

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 399.

The category of mood is a grammatical category of the verb that shows the relation between the action denoted by the verb and reality from the point of view of the speaker.

e. g. He reads a lot. Do, read now. He would have read the book up to the end if he hadn't fallen ill.

In these examples one and the same action to read is presented as a) a regular action really taking place in reality; b) a desirable action the performance of which by the listener the speaker stimulates; c) an unreal action. This difference is expressed by different mood-forms.

Opinions differ on the number of moods in English. M. Deutschbein puts forward 16 moods, A.I. Smirnitsky, O.S. Akhmanova and some other scholars point out six moods (the indicative, the imperative, subjunctive 1, subjunctive 2, the suppositional and the conditional moods), B.A. Ilyish, I.P. Ivanova, B.S. Khaimovich, B.I. Rogovskaya find three moods (the indicative, the imperative and the subjunctive moods). Nobody hesitates though that 1) there is a category of mood in modern English; and 2) there are at least two moods in the language, one of them is the indicative mood. The existence of different systems of moods can be justified by the absence of direct correspondence between meaning and form: one and the same mood form can have two or more meanings depending on the context; one modal meaning can have two or more forms of expression.

To establish the category of mood we are to oppose not individual forms but systems of forms each mood possesses.

The indicative mood is the basic mood of the verb. Its meaning presupposes correspondence between the statement and reality, the action is presented by the speaker as a fact of reality. The peculiarity of the indicative mood is that it indicates exact temporal characteristics of an action while other moods are not objective in this respect.

The imperative mood presents an action as an order, command, request addressed to the listener. It is the speaker's will. That is why it is natural to speak of its modal, subjective meaning. The form of the imperative mood is practically not developed morphologically, it has no grammatical markers of the category. Its use is limited to one type of sentence – the imperative sentence. The peculiarity of the imperative mood is that it conveys the grammatical meaning of the second person, and the use of the subject is hardly necessary. The speaker is more likely to use the pronoun for emphasis in emotional speech.

e. g. You leave me alone!

Some linguists (e. g. G.N. Vorontsova) treat combinations of the type let sb do sth as analytical forms of the imperative mood for the 1st and 3d persons.

e. g. Let us write a test. Let him go.

If we admit these sentences being imperative we should say that the subject of each is expressed by the objective case of a pronoun. It is unacceptable from the point of view of sentence structure. Besides, being compared Go! and Let him go. display a certain difference in meaning. The second sentence seems to be devoid of the meaning of 'direct urge', thus it lacks the typical meaning of the imperative mood.

The subjunctive mood represents the action as imaginary, desirable, unreal, etc. The peculiarity of the subjunctive mood is that tense-forms do not denote time but reality / irreality or some other meaning. To express tense relations sometimes we employ the category of order.

e. g. If he were here he would help.

If he had beenhere he would have helped.

II. ITEMS FOR DISCUSSION

1. General characteristic of the English verb.

2. The notion of time. The category of tense. Absolute and relative tenses. Different systems of tenses. The problem of the grammatical future and future-in-the-past tenses.

3. Lexical classification of verbs into terminative and durative. The category of aspect. The English and the Russian aspects compared.

4. The category of order. Interrelation of the categories of tense, aspect, order.

5. Lexical classification of verbs into transitive and intransitive. The category of voice.The problems of the reflexive, reciprocal, middle voices. "Get" and "become" passive.

6. The problem of the number of moods in English. Peculiarities of moods.

7. The categories of person and number.