ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

A CONTRASTIVE APPROACH TO THE DOMAIN OF THE VERB

If we were to use a most suggestive figure of speech to compare language to the human body as the former is a living organism, too then we should say that vocabulary represents the flesh and grammar is the skeleton whose backbone is no other than the verb itself. It is true that, in many situations, the speaker succeeds in getting the message across without much grammatical accuracy, but for expressing entirely clear ideas, without misinterpretations, he should be able to form correct sentences that are not complete in the absence of verbs functioning as predicates. Thus, in English as well as in Romanian the Indicative Mood is factual, the mood of assertions and occurs in statements that provide a (true or false) representation of the world, of reality. Cornilescu1 remarks that an important syntactic property of the Indicative Mood is the presence of the deictic category of tense understood as the relationship between the form of the verb and the time of the action or state it describes. It is the temporal reference that sets the Indicative sentence in the frame of reality (i.e. the informative use of the language as opposed to the prescriptive use hypothetical course of affairs characteristic to the Subjunctive Mood). In English, the Indicative Mood has the following tenses, as dimensions of life, seen in their chronological vicinity: 1) Simple Present / Present Continuous, Present Perfect Simple / Present Perfect Continuous on the axis of present time; 2) Simple Past / Past Continuous, Past Perfect Simple / Past Perfect Continuous, Future in the Past on the axis of past time; 3) Simple Future / Future Continuous, Future Perfect on the axis of future time. The tenses of the Indicative in Romanian are (according to the same temporal axes): 1) Prezent, Perfect simplu; 2) Perfect compus, Imperfect, Mai mult ca perfect; 3) Viitor, Viitor anterior. Besides the fact that our language lacks the category of aspect, one can see in the enumeration above that there are fewer tenses in Romanian, which means that not every English tense has a correspondent of its own. Thus, Present Simple / Continuous are assimilated with Prezent, Present Perfect Simple either with Perfect compus or with

Prezent (depending on the semantic value of the verb), Present Perfect Continuous with Prezent or even Perfect compus(when the action ends in the moment of speaking). For past time reference, the equivalent of Simple Past is Perfect compus (and even Imperfect in certain contexts; to render Past Continuous and Past Perfect Continuous we also use Imperfect, and the correspondent of Future in the Past is Viitor. Past Perfect Simple is associated with Mai mult ca perfect in Romanian. For future time reference, things are easier as the tenses are fairly similar (Simple Future / Future Continuous = Viitor, Future Perfect = Viitor anterior). Another essential feature in the economy of the English grammar which makes it the more different from Romanian is a stricter, and more logical therefore, sequence of tenses. Its almost geometrically symmetrical rules are presented in the figures below: Figure 1.The Sequence of tenses in the present: Present tense in the Subordinate clause main clause Subordinate clause **.* Anteriority: a. Present Perfect Simultaneity: Posteriority: b. Past tense (with Present tense Future tense adverbial modifier of past time) Examples: Anteriority: I see that you are working hard on this project. Simultaneity: I am glad that you have passed all the exams. He says that he went to the seaside last summer. Posteriority: They hope that nothing bad will happen to them again.

Figure 2.The Sequence of tenses in the past: Past tense in the Subordinate clause main clause Subordinate clause *** Anteriority: Simultaneity: Posteriority: Past Perfect Past tense Future in the past Examples: Anteriority: He went out when / after he had finished his homework. Simultaneity: She knew he was lying to her. Posteriority: The mayor promised that the new school would be built the next year.

The Romanian grammar is more permissive as one can very well use Prezent or Viitor in the subordinate clause, for example, after a verb in the Past tense in the main clause: L-am intrebat cum se simte.(I asked him how he was feeling.); Ei au intrebat-o pe Elena cand se va intoarce. (They asked Helen when she would be back.)

REFERENCES: 1. CORNILESCU, A., 1976, The Transformational Syntax of English, T.U.B., Bucuresti.