Course paper Theme: Verbs as a part of speech, grammatical categories of verbs

Adverbial modifier of:

· Time and frequency,

· Place and direction,

· Manner and attendant,

· Circumstances,

· Cause,

· Purpose,

· Result,

· Condition,

· Concession,

· Degree

The attribute

The attribute is a secondary part of the sentence modifying a part of the sentence expressed by a noun, a substantivized pronoun, a cardinal numeral, and any substantivized word, and characterizing the thing named by these words as to its quality or property. The attribute can either precede or follow the noun it modifies. Accordingly we use terms prepositive and postpositive attribute. The position of an attribute with respect to its head-word depends partly on the morphological peculiarities of the attribute itself, and partly on stylistic factors. The size of the prepositive attributive phrase can be large in ME. Whatever is included between the article and the noun, is apprehended as an attribute.

The paradigm of these linguistic means is rather manifold. We find here:

1) adjectives: the new house; a valuable thing; 2) nouns in the Possessive Case: my brother's book; 3) noun-adjunct groups (N + N): world peace, spring time; 4) prepositional noun-groups: the daughter of my friend 5) pronouns (possessive, demonstrative, indefinite): my joy, such flowers, every morning, a friend of his, little time; 6) infinitives and infinitival groups: an example to follow, a thing to do; 7) gerunds and participles: (a) walking distance, swimming suit; (b) a smiling face, a singing bird; 8) numerals: two friends, the first task; 9) words of the category of state: faces alight with happiness;10) idiomatic phrases: a love of a child, a jewel of a nature, etc.

Word order in English.

The term ''word order” is a singularly unhappy one, as it is based on a confusion of two distinct levels of language structure: the level of phrases and that of the sentence. To approach this problem from a viewpoint doing justice to modern linguistic theory, we should carefully distinguish between two sets of phenomena: the order of words within a phrase and the order of parts of the sentence within a sentence. Here we are again confronted with the problem of the attribute: if the attribute is a secondary part of the sentence, its place falls under the heading "order of the parts of the sentence”; if, on the other hand the attribute is part, not of a sentence, but of a phrase, its place with reference to its head word must be considered within the theory of the phrase and its parts. Since this question has not been settled yet, we may consider the place of the attribute in this chapter.

All other questions ought to be discussed under the heading "order of sentence parts", but as it is hardly possible to introduce-a change and to dismiss a term so firmly established, we will keep the term "word order", bearing in mind that it is quite conventional: what we shall discuss is the order of the parts of the sentence.

The English language is characterized by a rigid word order in accordance with which the subject of declarative sentences, as a rule, precedes the predicate. This is the so-called direct word order,e.g. The assistant greeted the professor.

Any deviation from the rigid word order is termed inversion, e.g. Often has he recollected the glorious days of the Civil War. The direct object is usually placed after the verb unless the indirect object precedes it, e.g. He offered me his help. Sometimes the object is pushed to the front of the sentence, it occurs when: