nominal collocation: The door on the left was closed, and the door on the right was open.
Thus, with the construction in question the context may have both voice-suppressing, "statalising" effect, and voice-stimulating, "processualising" effect. It is very interesting to note that the role of processualising stimulators of the passive can be performed, alongside of action-modifying adverbials, also by some categorial forms of the verb itself, namely, by the future, the continuous, and the perfect - ie by the forms of the time-aspect order other than the indefinite imperfect past and present. The said contextual stimulators are especially important for limitive verbs, since their past participles combine the semantics of processual passive with that of resultative perfect. Cf.: p align="justify"> The fence is painted. - The fence is painted light green. - The fence is to be painted. - The fence will be painted. _ The fence has just been painted. -The fence is just being painted. p align="justify"> The fact that the indefinite imperfect past and present are left indifferent to this gradation of dynamism in passive constructions bears one more evidence that the past and present of the English verb constitute a separate grammatical category distinctly different from the expression of the future (see Ch. XIV).
XVII. VERB: MOOD
The category of mood, undoubtedly, is the most controversial category of the verb. On the face of it, the principles of its analysis, the nomenclature, the relation to other categories, in particular, to tenses, all this has received and is receiving different presentations and appraisals with different authors. Very significant in connection with the theoretical standing of the category are the following words by B. A. Ilyish: "The category of mood in the present English verb has given rise to so many discussions, and has been treated in so many different ways, that it seems hardly possible to arrive at any more or less convincing and universally acceptable conclusion concerning it" ; [Ilyish, 99].
Needless to say, the only and true cause of the multiplicity of opinion in question lies in the complexity of the category as such, made especially peculiar by the contrast of its meaningful intricacy against the scarcity of the English word inflexion. But, stressing the disputability of so many theoretical points connected with the English mood, the scholars are sometimes apt to forget the positive results already achieved in this domain during scores of years of both textual researches and the controversies accompanying them. p align="justify"> We must always remember that the knowledge of verbal structure, the understanding of its working in the construction of speech utterances have been tellingly deepened by the studies of the mood system within the general framework of modern grammatical theories, especially by the extensive investigations undertaken by Soviet scholars in the past three decades. The main contributions made in this field concern the more and more precise statement of the significance of the functional plane of any category; the exposition of the subtle paradigmatic correlations that, working on the same unchangeable verbal basis, acquire the status of changeable forms; the demonstration of the sentence-constructional value of the verb and its mood, the meaningful destination of it being realised on the level of the syntactic predicative unit as a whole. Among the scholars we are indebted to for this knowledge and understanding, to be named in the first place is A. I. Smirnitsky, whose theories revolutionised the presentation of English verbal grammar; then B. A. Ilyish, a linguist who skilfully demonstrated the strong and weak points of the possible approaches to the general problem of mood; then G. N. Vorontsova, L. S. Barkhudarov, I. B. Khlebnikova, and a number of others, whose keen observations and theoretical generalisations, throwing a new light on the analysed phenomena and discussed problems, at the same time serve as an incentive to further investigations in this interesting sphere of language study. It is due to the materials gathered and results obtained by these scholars that we venture the present, of necessity schematic, outline of the category under analysis. p align="justify"> The category of mood expresses the character of connection between the process denoted by the verb and the actual reality, either presenting the process as a fact that really happened, happens or will happen, or treating it as an imaginary phenomenon, ie the subject of a hypothesis, speculation, desire. It follows from this that the functional opposition underlying the category as a whole is constituted by the forms of oblique mood meaning, ie those of unreality, contrasted against the forms of direct mood meaning, ie those of reality, the f...
