"III.

The verb phrase"

Randolph Quirk & Sidney Greenbaum

[notes by Pat Conner]

These notes cover pages 26-58 of Quirk & Greenbaum's A Concise Grammar of Contemporary English (Philadelphia: HBJ, 1973).

"Sometimes I think that the surest sign that intellegent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."

--- Calvin & Hobbes

TYPES OF VERB Note that lexical verbs constitute an open system and auxiliaries constitute a closed system. (See 2.14 if you've forgotten the difference between open and closed. Generally, you can distinguish between open and closed systems by the primary duty of the members of each class. Members of an open class (nouns, adjectives, lexical verbs, and many adverbs) mostly provide semantic material or "content," whereas members of a closed system (pro-forms, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, articles) provide syntactic information.

VERBAL FORMS AND THE VERB PHRASE A verb may occur in as many as five different forms. In fact, one test for a verb is whether it takes at least two of these five forms. Study the chart on page 27

base: this is the form of the verb with no morphological additions, such as -ed or -ing. It serves for all forms but one in the present tense, for all forms of the imperative, for all forms of the lexical subjunctive, and for all forms of the infinitive (with or without "to"). One job of the verb phrase is to reduce the confusion so many uses of the base might cause, if other things did not help us to separate the uses. -s form: this is the 3rd person singular present. It's like your appendix; you really don't need it, but it's there, and variants of English have begun to drop it. past or -ed(1): this marks the past in every instance of the simple past. [Now do NOT confuse past tense with a perfect aspect.] -ing form: this is used to mark the main verb in a progressive aspect (e.g., I am calling you.) or as a present participle. [REMEMBER: participles are adjectives. Not all -ing words are participles. They are only participles if they have an adjective function as in "John, sweating profusely, was straining to win."] While Quirk and Greenbaum don't mention it here, -ing is also used to make the verbal noun or gerund: "eating is more fun than sleeping." -ed(2) form: used to mark the verb in the perfective aspect, in the passive form, and in the participle. In regular lexical forms, you usually see -ed employed, but in some forms you find -en. In order to distinguish between -ed(1) and -ed(2), some systems of grammar say that this is the en form, even though an -ed is often used to spell it. The adjectival quality of the past participle form is seen in something like, "tired of trying, she took a break." THE MORPHOLOGY OF LEXICAL VERBS -- REGULAR LEXICAL VERBS Regular lexical verbs employ all five forms. If you now the base, you can predict the other forms, and -- indeed -- with any regular form, you can predict the base. Note that this section is really about spelling rules, and you should consult it if you're creating units on spelling.

The -ing and -s forms The past and the -ed participle Further inflectional spelling rules Doubling of consonant Treatment of -y Deletion of -e THE MORPHOLOGY OF LEXICAL VERBS -- IRREGULAR LEXICAL VERBS

While regular lexical verbs are clearly an open system (if you coin a verb, you'll almost certainly make it a regular lexical verb), the irregular lexical verbs are pretty much a closed system. They share with regular lexical verbs, however, the primary duty of providing semantic material rather than syntactical information, so we classify them as lexical verbs. Historically, English (or protoGermanic, the ancestor of English) had two verb systems which historical linguists call "weak" and "strong" (regular and irregular, respectively). The strong verb system was categorized into seven sub-classes, and the verbs in the little jingle which follows are (in their Old English forms) typical of the verbs in each of the sub-classes:

The cat will bite [I.] the bird that will not fly [II.] And spring [III.] on the cat when he comes [IV.] by; He gives [V.] no quarter and takes [VI.] no guff, And holds [VII.] him a fool who falls [VII.] for such stuff.

One of the major difficulties you will encounter in teaching English grammar will have to do with the irregular lexical verbs. We can tell from comparing how they work in different Germanic languages that they were always a bit fluid in their categorization. Quirk and Greenbaum do an admirable job of placing our modern verbs into a seven-part system, and they draw on much historical data to do it, but -- again -- the sub-classes do not exactly correspond to the historical classes, because they are still very fluid. Currently, we hear much shifting of -ed(1) with -ed(2), where both forms are irregular: drink, drunk, have drank; ring, rung, have rang, etc. The most important thing you can do is make students aware of the fluid nature of this situation, so that they can consciously look for the way the irregular lexical verbs are used in various registers.

AUXILIARIES It should be obvious, but it may not be: do, have, and be exist as lexical verbs as well as auxiliaries. As lexical verbs, do means "to perform"; have means "to possess"; and be means "to exist." Note the list of contractions in 3.20. Contractions are a regular part of English, and are only stigmatized in formal writing, except for "ain't," which appears to have been stigmatized through the efforts of several generations of school marms.

The modal auxiliaries Primary modal auxiliaries

Note the semantic force of all of the modals as variations on the ability to achieve a thing. Some dialects combine modals to create even finer variations on ability: "I might could help you" is different from "I might help you" and "I could help you." While it is clearly a dialect marker, it also represents a great complexity in the verb phrase of the user. Consider whether "can" and "could" (as well as the other paired modals) are contrasted by tense or by something else.

Marginal modal auxiliaries FINITE AND NON-FINITE VERB PHRASES This is a dynamic versus a stative distinction. "He is working" uses a finite verb phrase and it is dynamic: "working" is used as a part of the verb in the progressive aspect. "I found him working" uses a non-finite verb phrase and it is stative:"working" here is a present participle, and it's adjective quality makes it stative. If you insert the deleted "to be" (I found him [to be] working), you can re-constitute the infinitive form in the non-finite verb phrase.

Note the table in 3.24. It's a major consideration of English grammar that the items always follow a clear order. I'm not aware, either, of dialects which invert these orders:

modal: He would visit. perfective: He would have visited. progressive: He would have been visiting passive: He would have been being visited. There may be gaps (e.g., he was being visited), but it's UNGRAMMATICAL to have *Hevisited have would.

CONTRASTS EXPRESSED IN THE VERB PHRASE The contrasts give in 3.25 include: voice, question, negation, emphasis, and imperatives.

TENSE, ASPECT, AND MOOD These are the major contrasts in English. The following considerations are basic:

English has (and has always had) only two tenses. We only mark the verb for the present (which is a nul morpheme) and the past. The English future is always implied by modals, and the gradations of expression are very complex. Aspect is the manner in which the action is regarded. For instance is it regarded as having passed or having started after (or before) another thing? Just as English implies the future, it tends to imply any complexities of past action by referring it to an ongoing or not ongoing state or to other actions which are or are not completed. Mood is, in short, attitude, such as certainty, obligation, possibility, etc. Tense and Aspect Present timeless: she is generous limited: he is being generous instantaneous: I take my place Past The past and the perfective Indefinite and definite Past perfect The past and the progressive The perfect progressive Verbal meaning and the progressive Not all verbs are capable of being used in a progressive construction. This is one of those places where semantics is related to grammar. If the verb is semantically dynamic (note the five classes of dynamic verbs at 3.35), then it can be progressive. If the verb belongs to one of the two stative classes, then it won't be made progressive in most variants of idiomatic English. To create a progressive out of these verbs will sound foreign, because -- in fact -- it is:

I am understanding your remarks. The pretty box has been containing the candy.

The Future Historical linguists love to speculate on how it is that Germanic languages have no "synthetic" future -- that is, they have no inflection to make a future the way they can make a past, although other Indo-European languages have such a future. In fact, we have at least eight ways of rendering the future through implication (and Old English had a similar inventory of futurities). If proto-Germanic were as rich in suggesting the future periphrastically (that is, using several words to do so), then the synthetic future may simply have withered away.

Will and shall Be going to + infinitive Present progressive Simple present Will/shall + progressive Be to + infinitive Be about to + infinitive Future time in the past Mood We usually say that there are three moods: the indicative (i.e., the attitude of indicating), the imperative (i.e., the attitude of giving commands), and the subjunctive (the attitude of supposing what is unknown or contrary to fact). The sense of the subjunctive is much more complex, however. It encompasses the following five ways of dealing with gradations of the known and the unknown:

The subjunctive Historically, this was an entirely different conjugation of the verb, and we can see the sort of variety it once had in the elaborate subjunctives of French or Spanish or German. Old English had an inventory of subjunctive forms as wide spread as German. Now we have some frozen forms of the subjunctive in the verb "to be" and one special form in the present, where the third person singular is not inflected with an -s. What the book calls the "mandative" subjunctive requires this verb form:

Common sense demands that he think twice.

This is, however, a very formal register for most speakers, and most of us would get around the subjunctive by saying, "It's only common sense to think twice."

There are also formulaic subjunctives (God save the Queen!, etc.), but either they are formulaic for a speaker or they are not in his/her ideolect.

Many -- but by no means all -- American speakers still have the subjunctive were for use in hypothetical instances: "If I were you, I wouldn't waste time on the subjunctive."

Modal past Other past-tense forms of "to be" may take a subjunctive sense, too: "We were catching the 8 o'clock train and it is nearly 8 o'clock." The were cannot possible mean past time here, but it is used to suggest mood appropriate to the subjunctive, that is that the train appears not to be about to arrive, so that the condition of catching it is contrary to fact.

The uses of the modal auxiliaries Check the lists for an attempt to identify the gradations of meaning in the modals.

The tense of modals What we call modals are sometimes call "preterite-present" verbs by historical linguists. It is thought that, historically, the original past-tense form of irregular verbs came to be used as the present, and a new past-tense form was created using the inflection of the regular verb. The use of modal in setting conditions or subjunctive moods, however, make it impossible for us to think of "would" as merely the past tense of