Microsoft Word Theoretical Course of English Grammar

Lecture 8 
The system of grammatical categories of the verb: person 
and number, tense, aspect, voice, mood 
1.
Grammatical categories of person and number 
The categories of person and number are closely connected with each other. There is a 
concord between the subject of a sentence and its finite verb predicate. That is, the subject 
dominates the predicate determining the person and number of the predication
, 
while the 
predicate dominates the subject, ascribing to it some action, state or quality 
(e.g.: Ann plays the 
piano every day. We play the piano every day.). 
This concord is particularly clear with the 
present tense of the verb “be” (
I am; you are; he/she/it is; we/you/they are
), while with the rest 
of the full verbs this overt (
თვალსაჩინო
, 
ენობრივად
გამოხატული
) concord is restricted to 
a contrast between the third person singular present and other persons or plural number. 
Therefore, grammarians consider grammatical categories of person and number as syntactically 
conditioned categories. 
2.
Grammatical category of tense
When we speak about the expression of time by the verb, it is necessary to distinguish be-
tween 1) the general notion of time and its lexical denotation, and 2) the grammatical time 
proper, which is called tense.
TIME, like space, is considered to be a universal form of existing things and phenomena 
that are continually changing. We can think of time as a line on which is located, as a conti-
nuously moving point, the present moment, the linguistic content of which is the moment of 
speech. Anything ahead of the present moment is in the future, and anything behind it is in the 
past.
THE PRESENT MOMENT 
PAST
|
FUTURE 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[now] 

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Theoretical Course of English Grammar 
Script by prof. 
Nino Kirvalidze
43
TENSE (from Lat. 
tempus
) is a grammatical time, which is one of the typical meanings of 
the finite verb. The expression or non-expression of grammatical time, together with the 
expression or non-expression of grammatical mood, constitutes the basis of the verbal category 
of finitude, i.e. the basis for the division of all the forms of the verb into finite and non-finite.
Tense is a grammatical category that is realized with the help of verb inflexion. Since Eng-
lish has no inflected form of the verb for expressing future time, the threefold semantic 
opposition of time is reduced to two tenses: the present tense and the past tense
3
(Greenbaum & 
Quirk 1991: 47-48; Biber, Conrad & Leech 2003: 150-156).
The main principle of the morphological classification of verbs is the way they form two 
of their forms: simple past and past participle (i.e. participle II). Accordingly verbs are divided 
into two large groups: regular and irregular verbs. Regular verbs form their past simple and past