Lingua e traduzione inglese II

VERB SYNTAX: PRESENT SIMPLE AND PRESENT PERFECT

Interpersonal Function

We have to consider the of language (Halliday). We shall

integrate Halliday’s Functional view of the Verbal Group with Chomsky’s

Verb Phrase.

Transformational view of Syntactic Inflection and Movement in the

Present Simple: Inflectional Node and Movements

Three ‘persons’, both in the singular and in the plural, which cannot be omitted,

normally introduce an English Verb Phrase. These persons represent the syntactic

categories through which the semantic notion of Logical Subject of a sentence is often

linguistically actualized. The three persons are I, You, He/She/It (singular) and We, You,

They (plural).

Between a ‘Person’ and the Verb Phrase, that the Person introduces there must be

agreement

syntactic . To explain this point, we have to consider the Affirmative form

of the Present Simple of the verb work.

Affirmative Singular plural

1 person: I work We work

2 person: You work You work

3 person: He/She/It works They work –s

In the Affirmative form of the Present Simple, agreement is signalled by an ending

ss sh ch, x o

that is added to the verb at the 3 person singular. (Verbs ending in , , , or

es

add – , instead of –s alone, to form the 3 person singular). Endings like this are called

inflections and they encode grammatical properties. The –s ending signals that the

present tense inflection

verb is in the present tense and for this reason it is called .

The verb-forms for the other persons in the present Simple are all the same and are

defined as base-forms.

The verb to be is an exception because in the Present Tense singular it has different

forms for the three persons:

Singular plural

1 person: I am We are

2 person: You are You are

3 person: He/She/It is They are

Differently from ‘to be’, the verb to have follows the general rule of the base-form for

all the persons except for the 3 person singular which is ‘has’.

These are simply lexical verbs. In the English Present-Simple Affirmative form, a main

Finite Finite Operator

verbs is always (the , in Halliday’s terms) which means that it

Inflection for Tense

carries the (and again in Halliday’s view, it also signals the

Mood – Modo, in the Italian grammar terminology – the Indicative Mood). Chomsky

Finite Verb

claims that in the mind of the native speaker of English, this is part of a

cognitive mechanism, which assumes sentences (represented as S) contain a node

that labels as I (short form for inflection).

I-Node Verb Tense Agreement

This controls two things: the and the between

Subjects Verbs.

and These two things can have positive or a negative value. If the

Finite Verb is inflected as a Present Tense it is represented as [+Tense, +Present] and

agreement with the Subject.

[+Agr] standing for If it is inflected in the Past Tense, it is

represented as [+Tense, -present] and [+Agr]. The Subject of a clause is often

Noun Noun Phrase Verb

represented by a , and conventionally labelled as (NP). A is

Verb Phrase

labelled as a (VP).

Negative and Interrogative forms respectively deny, or doubt the process expressed

by the Verb. Negative Form not

If we want to form the , we cannot simply add to the affirmative

sentence. This is impossible with to be but only because they have also the function of

auxiliary verbs.

Negative singular plural

1 person: I am not/I’m not (a worker) We are not/aren’t (workers)

2 person: You are not/aren’t (a w.) You are not/aren’t (w.)

3 person: He/ She is not/isn’t (a w.) They are not/aren’t (w.)

And still likewise say:

not haven’t have got

I have / I [a job] (this is an obsolete form, now replaced by )

transformational rule

The syntactic rule to form a correct sentence is a , which

‘dummy’ do

consists in inserting the auxiliary , as in:

Negative singular plural

do not/don’t do not/don’t

1 person: I work We work

do not/don’t do not/don’t

2 person: You work You work

does not/doesn’t do not/don’t

3 person: He/She/It work They work

do do-support not Specifier

The insertion of is called , and the negative particle is a

(Spec) cliticized

that can also be onto the auxiliary in order to obtain a contracted

dummy

form. The word indicates that the auxiliary do loses its original meaning as

tense-marker

lexical verb; in fact, it is only used as a with no other meaning in itself

except of emphasizing the change of perspective from Affirmative to Negative.

Present Tense inflection do

It is important to notice that the is carried by , which in this

I-Node

case represents the of the sentence:

She (NP) does (I-N) not (SPEC) work (V).

do-form base-form does

The is the of the auxiliary, whereas the 3 person singular is

inflection,

the only one that has a marked so that the lexical verb that follows does not

need the –s as in the corresponding Affirmative form.

Interrogative

The Present Simple form needs another transformation rule, called

Subject-auxiliary inversion movement do

, according to which the auxiliary must

fronted

be – that is to say, must precede the Subject, as in:

Interrogative singular plural

1 person: do I work? Do we work?

2 person: do you work? Do you work?

3 person: does she/he work? Do they work?

Inversion movement do

consists in inserting before the main verb in the Affirmative

assertive emphasis,

form in order to achieve an and then inverting it with the Subject

to add a questioning stress.

Negative Interrogative

The form has a double emphasis due to the insertion of the

not

negative Specifier – in fact, it normally signals a rhetorical question. The Negative

non-contracted full-form

Interrogative form has two different versions: the or in which

do fronted, contracted form

only the auxiliary is as in (10), and the in which both the

do not do fronted,

auxiliary and the Specifier , cliticized onto , are as in(11):

Negative Interrogative

(10) do I not work?; does he not work?; etc.

(11) don’t I work?; doesn’t he work?; etc.

Interrogative Negative Interrogative to be

The and forms in the Present Simple of

to have (have got)

and obviously do not need the do-support, yet they follow the

general ‘interrogative’ rule of the subject-verb inversion movement, as these

sentences:

Interrogative and Negative Interrogative in the Present Simple of ‘to be’

Am I? are you? Is he/she/it? Are we/you/they?

Am I not? Aren’t I? Is he/she/it not? / Isn’t he/she/it? Are you/we/they not? / aren’t

you/we/they?

Interrogative and Negative Interrogative in the Present Simple of ‘to have’

Have I got? Has he/she/it got? Have we/you/they got?

Have I not got? / Haven’t Igot?; has he/she/it not got? / Hasn’t he/she/it got?; have

we/you/they not got? / haven’t we/you/they got?

got Have

The necessary addition of makes no difference to the sense of this verb. ,

however can be conjugated with the auxiliary do to indicate habitual actions:

Do have don’t

you classes in the evening? – Yes, but we have them very often.

Present Perfect: Finite Operator/ Non-Finite Operator

English Present Perfect

To form the another type of auxiliary verb is necessary, and

aspectual auxiliary

this is the so-called . The aspectual auxiliary, which is used to

have

signal the presence of the Perfect Aspect in the Verb Phrase, is . The Present

Present Simple have Past

Perfect is thus formed by the of followed by the

Participle Main Verb

of the (‘work’ in our case).

I/You/we/they have worked; he/she/it has worked.

present Present Simple past Past Participle

The two time dimension of ( ) and ( )

indicate that the period of time considered is the ‘present’, but it also includes the

have Finite Verb Finite Operator

‘past’. The auxiliary is the (or the ) that marks the

Tense Present I-Node

( ) and represent the of the sentence (Chomsky). The form of

Main Verb Past Participle, Non-Finite Verb,

the (‘work’) is a which means that it is a

Perfect Aspect

which cannot mark the Tense, but only signal the of the process. The

Non-Finite form of the Main Verb Predicator

is defined in Halliday’s Functional

Grammar.

She has worked. I-Node,

As we can see, from the the Tense of the Present-Perfect form is Present, a

present time

Finite verb-form focusing on the of the Speaker’s perception of the

process. The Aspect that introduces the duration of the process that began in the

past Non-finite form Past Participle

is represented by the of the .

Negative

To form the structure of the Present Perfect it is necessary to insert the

not have Main Verb

negative Specifier between the auxiliary verb and the . Its

not have/has

contracted version is formed by , cliticized onto :

have not haven’t has not hasn’t

I/you/we/they worked / worked; he/she/it worked /

worked.

Interrogative Subject-auxiliary inversion movement.

The form shows again a The

have fronted,

auxiliary verb is and thus precedes the Subject, as in:

Have Has

I/you//we/they worked; he/she/it worked?

Also the Negative Interrogative has two forms:

Have not has not Full-form

- I/you/we/they worked?; he/she/it worked? ;

Haven’t hasn’t

- I/you/we/they worked?; he/she/it worked? Contracted.

to be’ to have’

The Present Perfect forms of ‘ and ‘ follow the same syntactic rules of

the other verbs.

VERB PRAGMATICS: PRESENT SIMPLE AND PERFECT IN DISCOURSE

Pragmatic Functions of Tense and Aspects

Pragmatics concerns communication, it focuses on the kind of message that a Speaker

intends to communicate to his/her Listener (or Reader). To achieve their

communicative goals Speakers often manipulate language to produce their intended

effects. The recent field in pragmatic studies that explores the mechanism of language

Critical Discourse Analysis

manipulation is called .

It is necessary to say that most pragmatic meanings ascribe to linguistic forms are

‘socialized’ within a speech community, which means that their sense implications, or

connotations are automatically understood by most native members of a speech

sociolinguistic

community. This is so because such sense implications are part of the

schemata that members of the community have developed over time by

communicating with each other within native socio-cultural context of interaction.

social-semiotic schemata

Therefore, if on the one hand the developed by a speech

semantic (image) schemata

community are constituted by the informing the

socio-linguistic schemata