Б. С. Хаймович, Б. И. Роговская теоретическая грамматика английского языка

Verb Grammemes in Speech

§ 251. When used in speech a word has but one of its lexical meanings and all of its grammatical meanings (see § 21). Thus in the sentence He writes to me every week, the verb writes conveys only one of its lexical meanings ('communi­cates in writing'), whereas it has seven elementary grammatical meanings: 1) active voice, 2) non-perfect order, 3) non-con­tinuous aspect, 4) present tense, 5) indicative mood, 6) third person, 7) singular number.

Since each of these elementary meanings can be singled out in a certain opposeme, the entire grammatical meaning of a grammeme as a unit of language must be regarded as the sum of its elementary grammatical meanings (present tense + active voice + indicative mood, etc.).
When used in speech, however, in diverse speech situat­ions, in various lexical and syntactical surroundings, with verbs of different lexical meanings, a grammeme¹ may acquire some complex meaning which cannot be directly inferred from the meanings of its constituents. In other words, the entire meaning of a grammeme in speech is often not equal to the sum of its elementary meanings and we may speak, in some sense, of idiomatic meanings of grammemes. Hence the neces­sity of analysing the meanings of grammemes not only as units of language, but as units of speech as well.
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1} See note, p. 66.

§ 252. The systems of different moods, as we know, con­tain different grammemes. We shall therefore discuss the gram­memes of the indicative, subjunctive and imperative moods separately.

Within the indicative mood the meanings of 'tense', 'aspect' and 'order' are closely interlaced in speech. This is one of the reasons why linguists often do not distinguish them as separate categories of the language system. We shall study these meanings together.
The meanings of 'voice', 'person' and 'number' rarely mix with the other meanings, so that they can be studied separately. But the more or less simple meanings of 'number' and 'person' hardly need any special analysis ¹.
Now a few remarks about the names of grammemes. When we speak about 'passive voice' grammemes, we do not mean that there exist in English such grammemes whose only meaning is that of 'passive voice'. We simply unite all the grammemes that contain among others the meaning of 'pas­sive voice', and exclude those that do not contain this mean­ing. When we deal with the 'present perfect continuous', we unite all the grammemes that have the meanings of 'pre­sent tense', 'perfect order' and 'continuous aspect', and exclude those that do not possess at least one of these mean­ings.
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1} "The distinctions of person and number (he has walked, I have walked, etc.) are not relevant dimensions of the chronological system. Forms representing those distinctions are in free variation in respect to the system. Herein the distinctions will be ignored and the various forms used interchangeably." W. Diver. The Chronological System of the English Verb, Word. 1963, v. 19, No. 2, p. 141.