Under this heading should be listed such words and phrases as in the year 1066, during the time of the First World War, at the epoch of Napoleon, at the early period of civilisation, etc. p align="justify"> In the context of real speech the above types of time naming are used in combination with one another, so that the denoted event receives many-sided and very exact characterisation regarding its temporal status.
Of all the temporal meanings conveyed by such detailing lexical denotation of time, the finite verb generalises in its categorial forms only the most abstract significations, taking them as dynamic characteristics of the reflected process. The fundamental divisions both of absolutive time and of non-absolutive relative time find in the verb a specific presentation, idiomatically different from one language to another. The form of this presentation is dependent, the same as with the expression of other grammatical meanings, on the concrete semantic features chosen by a language as a basis for the functional differentiation within the verb lexeme. And it is the verbal expression of abstract, grammatical time that forms the necessary background for the adverbial contextual time denotation in an utterance; without the verbal background serving as a universal temporal "polariser" and "leader", this marking of time would be utterly inadequate. Indeed, what informative content should the following passage convey with all its lexical indications of time {in the morning, in the afternoon, as usual, never, ever), if it were deprived of the general indications of time achieved through the forms of the verb - the unit of the lexicon which the German grammarians very significantly call "Zeitwort" - the "time-word":
My own birthday passed without ceremony. I worked as usual in the morning and in the afternoon went for a walk in the solitary woods behind my house. I have never been able to discover what it is that gives these woods their mysterious attractiveness. They are like no woods I have ever known (S. Maugham). p align="justify"> In Modern English, the grammatical expression of verbal time, ie tense, is effected in two correlated stages. At the first stage, the process receives an absolutive time characteristic by means of opposing the past tense to the present tense. The marked member of this opposition is the past form. At the second stage, the process receives a non-absolutive relative time characteristic by means of opposing the forms of the future tense to the forms of no future marking. Since the two stages of the verbal time denotation are expressed separately, by their own oppositional forms, and, besides, have essentially different orientation characteristics (the first stage being absolutive, the second stage, relative), it stands to reason to recognise in the system of the English verb not one, but two temporal categories. Both of them answer the question: "What is the timing of the process?" But the first category, having the past tense as its strong member, expresses a direct retrospective evaluation of the time of the process, fixing the process either in the past or not in the past; the second category, whose strong member is the future tense, gives the timing of the process a prospective evaluation, fixing it either in the future (ie in the prospective posterior), or not in the future. As a result of the combined working of the two categories, the time of the event reflected in the utterance finds its adequate location in the temporal context, showing all the distinctive properties of the lingual presentation of time mentioned above. p align="justify"> In accord with the oppositional marking of the two temporal categories under analysis, we shall call the first of them the category of "primary time", and the second, the category of "prospective time" , or, contractedly, "prospect".
The category of primary time, as has just been stated, provides for the absolutive expression of the time of the process denoted by the verb, ie such an expression of it as gives its evaluation, in the long run, in reference to the moment of speech. The formal sign of the opposition constituting this category is, with regular verbs, the dental suffix - (e) d [-d,-t,-id], and with irregular verbs, phonemic interchanges of more or less individual specifications. The suffix marks the verbal form of the past time (the past tense), leaving the opposite form unmarked. Thus, the opposition is to be rendered by the formula "the past tense - the present tense", the latter member representing the non-past tense, according to the accepted oppositional interpretation. p align="justify"> The specific feature of the category of primary time is, that it divides all the tense forms of the English verb into two temporal planes: the plane of the present and the plane of the past, which affects also the future forms. Very importan...
