The adjective. Types of adj. Degrees of comparison

40. The verb. The categories of person and number.
Grammatically the verb is the most complex part of speech. First of all it performs the central role in realizing predication - connection between situation in the utterance and reality. That is why the verb is of primary informative significance in an utterance. Besides, the verb possesses quite a lot of grammatical categories. Furthermore, within the class of verb various subclass divisions based on different principles of classification can be found.
Semantic features of the verb. The verb possesses the grammatical meaning of verbiality - the ability to denote a process developing in time. This meaning is inherent not only in the verbs denoting processes, but also in those denoting states, forms of existence, evaluations, etc.
Morphological features of the verb. The verb possesses the following grammatical categories: tense, aspect, voice, mood, person, number, finitude and phase. The common categories for finite and non-finite forms are voice, aspect, phase and finitude. The grammatical categories of the English verb find their expression in synthetical and analytical forms. The formative elements expressing these categories are grammatical affixes, inner inflexion and function words. Some categories have only synthetical forms (person, number), others - only analytical (voice). There are also categories expressed by both synthetical and analytical forms (mood, tense, aspect).
Syntactic features. The most universal syntactic feature of verbs is their ability to be modified by adverbs. The second important syntactic criterion is the ability of the verb to perform the syntactic function of the predicate. However, this criterion is not absolute because only finite forms can perform this function while non-finite forms can be used in any function but predicate. And finally, any verb in the form of the infinitive can be combined with a modal verb.
Verb: Person and Number.
The Category of Person
The category of person serves to associate the process with three deictic categories in a communicative act: the speaker, the addressee and the one (ones) not participating in a communicative act. The speaker is first person (I, we); the addressee is second person (you) and the one (ones) not participating in the act is thirdperson (he, she, it, they)1. The deictic centre of the communicative act is the speaker, i.e. first person. In the process of communication, the deictic center keeps changing: I -> you; you -> I, which suggests that the deictic center is always the speaker, i.e. the one who is speaking at the moment.