15. The category of Mood

English verbs have four moods: indicative, imperative, subjunctive, and infinitive. Mood is the form of the verb that shows the mode or manner in which a thought is expressed. 1. Indicative Mood: expresses an assertion, denial, or question: Little Rock is the capital of Arkansas. Ostriches cannot fly. Have you finished your homework?2. Imperative Mood: expresses command, prohibition, entreaty, or advice: Don’t smoke in this building. Be careful! Don’t drown that puppy! 3. Subjunctive Mood: expresses doubt or something contrary to fact. 4. Infinitive Mood: expresses an action or state without reference to any subject. It can be the source of sentence fragments when the writer mistakenly thinks the infinitive form is a fully-functioning verb. When we speak of the English infinitive, we usually mean the basic form of the verb with “to” in front of it: to go, to sing, to walk, to speak. Verbs said to be in the infinitive mood can include participle forms ending in -ed and -ing. Verbs in the infinitive mood are not being used as verbs, but as other parts of speech: To err is human; to forgive, divine. Here, to err and to forgive are used as nouns. He is a man to be admired. Here, to be admired is an adjective, the equivalent of admirable. It describes the noun man. He came to see you. Here, to see you is used as an adverb to tell why he came.

16. Ways of clause connection

17. The category of voice

The verb is a part of speech which denotes an action. The grammatical meaning of action is understood widely: it is not only activities proper (He wrote a letter) but both a state (He will soon recover) and just an indication of the fact that the given object exists or belongs to a certain class of objects or persons (A chair is a piece of furniture). It is important that the verb conveys the feature as an action within some period of time, however unlimited. a) Semantically and grammatically English verbs are grouped as transitive (to give), intransitive (to sleep), regular, irregular, mixed, notional, auxiliary, link (to grow, to turn, to look), terminative (to come), non-terminative (to live) and verbs of double lexical (aspect) character (to see). b) The valency of verbs is their combinability. For example, all verbs are characterized by their subordination to the subject of a sentence; transitive verbs are usually combined with an object; auxiliary and link verbs need a notional predicative, etc. c) The verb has the grammatical categories of person, number, tense, aspect, voice, and mood. Voice is the category of the verb which indicates the relation of the predicate to the subject and the object. There are two undoubted voices in English: the active voice and the passive voice. The active voice shows that the person or thing denoted by the subject is the doer of the action expressed by the predicate. The passive voice shows that the person or thing denoted by the subject is acted upon. For example, the sentence I read the book is in the active voice because the subject I performs the action of reading and the direct object the book receives the action of reading. The sentence The book was read [by me], is in the passive voice because the subject The book receives the action of reading. Some scholars assume there is one more voice in English, the so-called neuter-reflexive voice. (E.g. She was dressing herself.)