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

The English and the Russian Verb Compared

§ 326. In compliance with the system adopted we shall now work out the comparison of the basic features of the English verb with those of the Russian verb.

I. Their lexico-grammatical meanings are fundamentally the same — both in English and in Russian the verb serves to denote an action, a process.
II. As to their lexico-grammatical (stem-building) mor­phemes, here as elsewhere we note a greater variety and abund­ance of stem-building affixes in Russian, both suffixes and prefixes. (Cf. -нича-, -ича-, -е-, -ова-, -ева-, -ствова-, etc; в-, вз-, воз-, вы-, пере-, за-, -из, -на, над-, о-, низ-, etc.). As shown above, the number of verb-building suffixes in English is limited (-ize, -ify, -en, -ate) though the prefixes are fairly numerous. The most productive ways of forming verbs in Modern English are conversion and the use of lexico-grammatical word-morphemes, neither being characteristic of Russian.
III. The dissimilarity between English and Russian verbs is more pronounced when we come to compare their paradigms, their grammatical categories. Although both in English and in Russian the verb exists as a system of systems, the respective structures of these systems are different:
1) The verbid systems of the two languages are quite different. There is no counterpart of the gerund in Russian. The English participle system includes only 7 grammemes represented by the words writing, having written, being writ­ten, having been written, written, living, having lived, whereas the Russian participle system contains hundreds of gram­memes.
2) Analytical forms are predominant in the paradigm of the English verb. As stated (§§ 12, 19), out of 64 forms of the verb lexeme write 59 are of analytical structure (92.2 per cent). This is not the case in Russian where among 358 forms of the paradigm of the verb делать (verbids included) only 38 are analytical (11.2 per cent)¹. The Russian verbids have no analytical forms if we do not count cases like Покурить бы! (Чайку бы! is also possible in Russian).
3) The sets of morphological categories are also different in the two languages. The English verb has the categories of order and posteriority not found in Russian ², while the Rus­sian verb possesses the categories of gender and case, alien to English (Cf. читала, читавший, читавшего, etc.).
4) Categories of the same name have essential distinctions in the two languages.
a) Voice in Russian (represented in opposemes like строит — строится) includes the active voice and the reflexive-neuter voice ³. Forms in -ся are polysemantic. They carry a number of connotations: reflexive (умывается), passive (дом строится), reciprocal (целуются), etc. Pas­sive grammemes are more standard and common in English. Not only transitive but intransitive objective verbs have passive opposites.
b) Nor are English and Russian aspects identical, though the general principle underlying the differentiation писал — написал, wrote — was writing is the same: they show the character of the action. In English the continuous aspect is much more specific than the non-continuous aspect. The continuous aspect, lays stress on the continuity of the action. When no specification is intended the non-continuous aspect is employed. In Russian the perfective aspect is more specif­ic. It accentuates the entirety of the action (or some stage of the action —он спел, он запел). When no specification is wanted, the imperfective aspect is used. Consequently the imperfective aspect has a much broader meaning than the continuous aspect (Ci. Дети летом спят в саду, The children sleep in the garden in summer, the continuous aspect would be out of place) and the perfective aspect is narrower than the non-continuous which makes a bare statement of the action and when used in speech, may acquire different aspect ive colouring. Cf. Он встретил друга. Не met his friend. He often met his friend at the club. The correlation of the aspects in the two languages can roughly be presented thus: