Introduction Verbs in inflection Infinitive, Participles Characteristics of non finite verb forms

The non-finite forms of the verb
Plan:

1. 
   Introduction
   
2. 
   Verbs in inflection
   
3. 
   Infinitive, Participles
   
4. 
   Characteristics of non finite verb forms
   
5. 
   Auxiliaries with non finite verb forms
   

Introduction
A nonfinite verb is a verb that is not finite. Nonfinite verbs cannot perform action as the root of an independent clause. Most nonfinite verbs found in English are infinitives, participles and gerunds. (They are sometimes called "verbals", but that term has traditionally applied only to participles and gerunds.) Additional nonfinite forms found in some other languages include converbs, gerundives and supines.

Nonfinite verbs typically are not inflected by grammatical tense, and they have little inflection for other grammatical categories.[1] Formally, they lack the three grammatical features (mood, tense and voice) that are "associated, independently or relatively, with ... the act of predication."[2] Generally, they also lack a subject dependent. One or more nonfinite verbs may be associated with a finite verb in a finite clause: the elements of a verb catena, or verb chain.

Because English lacks most inflectional morphology, the finite and the nonfinite forms of a verb may appear the same in a given context.

A non-finite verb is a verb form that does not show tense. In other words, you cannot tell if a sentence is in the past tense, present tense, or future tense by looking at a non-finite verb. Therefore, a non-finite verb is never the main verb in a sentence.

The aim of the course work: This research is aiming to answer the questions or the problems of the study. Therefore, the purpose of this research is:
1. To reveal the changes found as the result of derivational and non finite forms of the verb process from the word class or meaning changes.
The practical value of the course work: This study has a focus on the analysis of derivational and non finite forms of the verb processes. It includes the types and the structures of the derived and inflected words, and also the changes found as the result of derivational and non finite forms of the verb process, whether it is the grammatical, or semantical changes. The study specifically focuses on the derivational and non finite forms of the verb morphemes.
The structure of the course work
The paper consists of the introduction, two chapters and the conclusion. The introductory part gives why this topic should be studied with its possible objectives outlining the framework of the whole paper. It also includes justification of the choice of the topic and presents the research aims and the hypothesis. Chapter I, which is the initial part of the paper, provides background information about infinitives, gerunds and participles. In Chapter II, types of non finite verb forms are discussed. On the basis of such results a summary of the linguistic analysis is presented in the Conclusion, which also comments on the aims and the hypothesis of the course work.

I. Non-Finite forms of the verb

1.1 Verbs.
The non finite forms of the verb system of English comprises a large regular subsystem and a few highly circumscribed irregular patterns. The regular system contains a small number of general formations, which incorporate an even smaller number of exponents. This system is summarized in its entirety in (1).
Word Class Form Exponent Examples
Verb plural -s (/z/) mugs, spas, books, buses Verb ‘3sg present’ sells, walks, sees, pushes preterite -ed (/d/) quelled, talked, skied, swatted
‘past’ participle
‘present’ -ing (/Ie/) eating, being, squealing, participle walking
gerund
Adjective comparative -er (/@R/) faster, older, milder, yellower superlative -est (/@st/) fastest, oldest, mildest, yellowest
As the chart in (1) indicates, there are at most five productive non finite forms of the verb exponents in English. The morph that marks verb plurals, which is represented orthographically by -s and phonemically as /z/, is the same form asthe morph that marks 3sg verbs. Preterites and past participles are likewise marked by the morph -ed (/d/), while present participles and gerunds are marked by the morph -ing (/è/). The small exponent inventory of English leads to various cases of non finite forms of the verb syncretism. Descriptions of English must confront the problem of determining which cases of identity in form reflect the neutralization of contrastive morphosyntactic properties and which cases are merely due to the fact that English lacks the morphotactic resources to ‘spell out’ certain contrastive properties . Only verbs and verbs retain a significant number of irregular formations, as the irregularity in the adjectival system is restricted to the suppletion in good–better–best and bad–worse–worst. Forms in
-ing are completely regular, as are non-auxiliary verb forms in -s. The irregularity in the verb and verb systems is thus largely confined to verb plurals and verbal preterites and past participles. Irregular verb and verb forms can be assigned to ‘classes,’ such as those in (3) and (9), which exhibit the residue of once-productive patterns. However, these classes typically have few members in modern English – well below the threshold required to recruit new members on more than a sporadic basis – and thus exert a very limited influence on the inflection of new verbs or verbs.
As noted in the introduction, English verbs inflect for number, but not case or gender. The misalignment of prosodic and grammatical structure in English sometimes leads descriptions to treat the possessive marker -’s in Eloise’s book as a genitive inflection. Zwicky (1987) and Stump (2001) develop a variant of this analysis in which the marker
-’s is treated as an ‘edge inflection,’ and Carstairs-McCarthy (2005) provides a critical assessment of this analysis. Yet most accounts follow Hockett and Wells (1947: 193) in treating -’s as an element that attaches to the right edge of a verb phrase. On this analysis, possessive phrases have the left-branching structure in .
(2) a. [NP Eloise]’s book
b. [NP [NP Eloise]’s sister]’s book
c. [NP the director of personnel]’s office
The element -’s may attach to Eloise in (2a) and (2b) because proper names have the distribution of verb phrases. In (2b), -’s also attaches to the verb phrase Eloise’s sister, not to the common verb sister. Hence the sequence sister’s may be a prosodic unit, though it is not a grammatical unit. The phrasal character of -’s is confirmed by patterns like (2c), in which -’s clearly attaches to the verb phrase director of personnel and not to personnel, which just occurs at the right edge of the phrase.
Verb plurals in English can be assigned to the three broad categories in (3). Regular plurals are marked by the exponent -s (/z/), which has the phonologically-conditioned variants [z], [s] and [@z]. In addition, English contains a number of irregular formations. Some of these plurals have no exponent, others retain ablaut patterns, and a couple of verbs preserve the historically weak ending -en. The third class contains verbs whose plural forms have been borrowed with their singulars.
Type Exponent Examples
Regular -s mugs ([z]), spas ([z]), books ([s]), buses ([@z]) Irregular Ø sheep, fish, deer, etc.
ablaut man – men, foot – feet, goose – geese,
mouse – mice
-en child – children, ox – oxen
Foreign -on → -a criterion – criteria, phenomenon – phenomena
-is → -es analysis – analyses, crisis – crises, thesis – theses -ix → -ices matrix – matrices, index – indices, appendix – appendices
The vast majority of English verbs follow the regular pattern, as do virtually all new verbs. Apart from the odd whimsical extension of irregular formations, such as the use of vaxen as the plural of the computer system vax, irregular patterns are not extended to new verbs. The surviving strong plural forms are relatively stable, but there is some speaker variation regarding verbs such as roof, whose plurals may either conform to the irregular voicing pattern, and end in [vz], or follow the regular pattern, and end in [fs]. Speakers are, naturally, aware of the remaining strong patterns, and these patterns sometimes inhibit the formation of regular plurals like mongooses, even though speakers show an even more general reluctance to extend the irregular ablaut pattern to these cases.
Some frequently occurring foreign formations have been nativized in Modern
English, while others remain confined to particular registers. Whereas crises is securely established as the plural of crisis, forms such as phenomena are often used in the singular, even by some educated speakers. The use of data as the plural of datum is largely restricted to academic contexts; elsewhere data is more commonly encountered as a mass verb. Singulars in -ix often have alternative regular plurals in [@z]. Pairs of alternative plural forms may acquire different meanings, as in the case of appendices, which refers to material at the end of a printed work, and appendixes, which refers to body parts.
A number of forms, such as children or agendas, are occasionally described as ‘double plurals.’ These examples represent cases in which a historically plural form has been reanalyzed as a singular, and thus provided a base for the addition of ‘another’ plural marker. In the case of children, the -r reflects the strong Germanic plural (retained in the German cognate Kinder), while the final -en reflects the weak plural marker, added when -r was no longer a transparent plural marker. In Latin, the form agenda is likewise the plural of agendum. Although some speakers are aware of this paradigmatic relationship, agenda is most frequently used as a singular, whose plural is formed with the regular exponent -s. In short, English ‘double plurals’ do not involve what Matthews (1991) terms ‘extended exponence,’ as the property ‘plural’ is not multiply marked at any synchronic stage.
The historically strong ablauted plurals and weak plurals in -en tend to occur more freely in compounds and derivational formations than do regular or foreign plurals. For example, many speakers perceive a contrast between oxen cart and *dogs cart, between lice-infested and *fleas-infested, and between teeth cleaner and *hands cleaner. These contrasts are sometimes interpreted as evidence that irregular plural forms represent a type of ‘unproductive’
(Anderson 1992: 128) or ‘inherent’ (Booij 1996) inflection that may feed derivation, or, alternatively, as evidence that these form are number-neutral ‘second stems’ (cf. Aronoff 1994) that underlie plurals and compounds. There is, however, a comparatively large number of counterexamples to the generalization that s-plurals do not occur in compounds. Interestingly, many of these cases involve collective plurals, like those in (4), which follow the pattern of brother–brethren rather than brother–brothers.
(4) Singular Collective Plural Compound saving savings savings bank arm arms arms race system systems systems analyst custom customs customs union admission admissions admissions office .
There is a waning prescriptive pressure to pluralize the first element of Latinate compounds such as attorney general, sergeant major or notary public.
This is, however, very much a learned pattern, and plurals like attorneys general, sergeants major or notaries public are almost never encountered in spontaneous speech. Some nominalized forms of phrasal verbs follow a similar pattern, exhibiting head inflection (Stump 1995). Thus the agentive nominal passer-by, derived from the phrasal verb pass by, has the plural passers-by, not *passer-bys.
However, the placement of the plural marker appears to be influenced by the nominal character of the marker -er. In cases where a peripheral nominalizing marker is available, the plural reverts to edge inflection. In the colloquial language, a transitive phrasal verb such as pick up has the agentive nominal picker uper, where the first occurrence of -er attaches to the lexical verb pick and the second attaches to the phrasal verb pick up. The plural of this nominal is then picker upers, with a peripheral -s, not *pickers uper (or *pickers upers).
1.2 Verbs
Verb and verb paradigms in English both exhibit ‘word-inflection’ in the sense of Bloomfield (1933: 225). A verb stem may stand alone as a singular verb. A verb stem, which provides a base for the other forms in (8), may stand alone as an infinite, imperative or general present form.
(7) Form Regular Strong
Stem walk eat
Present Participle walking eating
Past Participle walked eaten
Preterite walked ate
3sg Present walks eats
Regular verb paradigms contain three forms based on the stem: a form in
-ing that functions as a present participle and gerund, a form in -ed that functions as a preterite and past participle, and a ‘3sg’ present form in -s. Irregular main verbs also have stem-based forms in -ing and -s, but exhibit distinctive patterns of preterite and participial suppletion. A partial list of patterns is given in (9). Quirk et al. (1985: 115ff) can be consulted for a more comprehensive list and detailed discussion.
(9) Pattern Stem Preterite Past Participle
Regular walk walked walked
No Syncretism sing sang sung eat ate eaten
No Variation cut cut cut hit hit hit
Preterite = Past Participle meet met metseek sought sought
Preterite = Stem beat beat beaten
Stem = Past Participle come came come
Due to their frequency, the irregular verbs are of importance to the learner of English, and are prominent in pedagogical descriptions. However, the classes exhibit essentially frozen patterns, and do not recruit formerly weak verbs, or apply to new verbs with any regularity. The psycholinguistic studies summarized in Clahsen (1999) indicate that native speakers of English memorize irregular conjugational forms, and do not ‘derive’ them synchronically from the stem form.
The conjugational system of English is very simple in certain respects. Regular paradigms contain four morphotactically simple forms, and irregular paradigms may add a fifth. Each form is either based on the stem and a regular suffix
(-ing, -ed or -s), or follows one of a small number of suppletive patterns. Hence, the main descriptive challenge for a description of English arises in determining the number of entries that are realized by these forms, particularly by the ‘past participle,’ the ‘3sg present’ and the ‘present participle.’ Some approaches to this challenge are outlined briefly below.
The pre-Bloomfieldian English tradition tends to recognize a large number of ‘compound tenses,’ which are ‘formed by the use of a present or a past tense of an auxiliary in connection with a participle or an infinitive’ (Curme 1935:
319). The individual compound tenses are summarized in (10). (10)
Tense/Aspect/Voice Auxiliary Main Verb
Progressive be Present Participle
Passive Past Participle
Perfect have
Future will Stem
This type of analysis nicely captures the way that periphrastic formations express morphosyntactic properties through distinctive combinations of forms.
For example, passive voice is not uniquely associated with the auxiliary be, which may also occur in the progressive, nor with the past participle, which may also occur in the perfect . Rather, passive voice is expressed by the distinctive combination of a general auxiliary be and a ‘past’ participle. Perfect aspect is similarly expressed by a past participle and form of have, as proposed in Ackerman and Webelhuth (1998) and Spencer (2001). The progressive is likewise expressed by be and a ‘present participle’ (Lee 2004).
The traditional conception of compound tenses is implicitly ‘constructionbased’ in essentially the sense of Kay and Filmore (1999). Properties such as passive, perfect and progressive are not ‘assembled’ in a bottom-up fashion from the meanings assigned to individual auxiliaries and participles. Instead, a traditional account proceeds in a topdown fashion from a properties to the particular combinations of auxiliaries and participles that spell them out. The meanings of auxiliaries and participles are preserved in a compound tense, but the meaning of the compound tense is more than just the sum of the meanings of its parts. The interpretation of the present perfect provides a useful illustration. The English present perfect is grammatically a present construction, as Klein (1992) confirms. The use of this construction to refer to past events reflects the implication that an event that is completed in the present must have occurred in the past. In an example such as has arrived, the present auxiliary has contributes the present tense meaning, the participle arrived contributes the lexical meaning of arrive, and the combination of has and arrived express perfective aspec t. The fact that the auxiliaries in passive, perfect and progressive tenses may themselves have compound forms introduces a limited degree of ‘recursion’ within the system of complex tenses. An example such as (11a) illustrates the full expansion of this system. Working outward from the passive be observed, one can construct the progressive be being observed, the perfect have been being observed, and finally the future will have been being observed. Although none of these properties are obligatorily present, they are always realized in the fixed order in (11b) when they are expressed.
(11) a. They surely will have been being observed.
b. Future Perfect Progressive Passive
The ‘expansions’ of the auxiliary system thus involve a finite – indeed quite small – number of elements, with highly restricted combinations. There are plausible explanations for some restrictions, while others are less well understood.
The innermost placement of the passive can be attributed to the claim that the passive is a derivational, stem-forming, process (Bresnan 1982; Blevins
2003a). Conversely, the outermost placement of the future will reflects the fact that will is a finite modal, and that verbs in English do not subcategorize for finite verb phrase complements. Yet the ordering of the perfect and progressive is not attributable to any general considerations of this nature.
Within the post-Bloomfieldian tradition that originates with Harris (1951) and Chomsky (1957, 1975), these patterns have usually been treated as syntactic.
The main disagreement within this literature concerns whether auxiliaries should be regarded as verbs in their own right (Ross 1969), as ‘specifiers’ of main verbs
(Chomsky 1970), or as a type of ‘functional’ category (Chomsky
1995). On the other hand, the morphosyntactic coherence of these expansions, and the limited combinations that they allow, have led a number of recent accounts (notably Börjars et al. (1997) and Ackerman and Stump (2004)) to rehabilitate a traditional perspective and treat them as morphological.
Apart from the auxiliaries be and have, all verbs in English have a single preterite form, which does not vary according to form of its subject. The future auxiliary will is also invariant, though some speakers retain a contrast between first and second person shall and third person will . The opposition between stem forms and forms in -s thus represents the only regular agreement pattern within the conjugational system of English. Although there is no question about the number of forms in a regular present paradigm, there is again some dispute about the number of present entries.
One traditional answer is supplied by Curme (1935), who proposes the six entries in (12): a 3sg entry walks and five homophonous entries, one for each person-number combination realized by walk. Most contemporary descriptions regard this analysis as unsatisfactory, since there is no motivation within the verb system for recognizing five distinct stem entries. (12) Person Singular Plural
1st walk walk
2nd walk walk
3rd walks walk
Huddleston (1984) adopts the Bloomfieldian idea that the verb paradigm with the largest number of forms determines the number of cells for all paradigms.
Since the present paradigm of be has three distinct forms: 1sg am, 3sg is and a general form are, Huddleston proposes that regular verbs also have the three entries in (13): a 3sg entry in -s, a 1sg stem entry, and a general stem entry.
(13) Form Person Number
walks 3 sg walk 1 sg walk
By treating am as an isolated entry within the irregular paradigm of be,
Quirk et al. (1985) reduce regular paradigms to the limit of two entries: a stem form and an s-form. Significantly, Huddleston (1984) and Quirk et al. (1985) agree in treating the stem form as a general present form, and the s-form as a dedicated 3sg form.