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Cognitive Grammar: tense, aspect, mood and voice

المؤلف:  Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green

المصدر:  Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction

الجزء والصفحة:  C18-P615

2026-02-25

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Cognitive Grammar: tense, aspect, mood and voice

We continue our investigation of the Cognitive Grammar account of the clause in this chapter by focusing on the verb string, a central feature of the English clause. In the last chapter, we set out the Cognitive Grammar account of grammatical constructions, and looked at how the relationships between the lexical verb and its dependents are captured in terms of autonomy and dependence. We now focus more closely on both the structural and semantic properties of the verb group within the clause. We begin with a short section that summarises the properties of English verb forms, which are central to the discussion in this chapter (section 18.1). We then explore what Langacker calls the clausal head, which is a string of verbs that can include a perfect construction, a progressive construction and a passive construction, as well as the content verb (section 18.2). As we see in this section, Cognitive Grammar views auxiliaries have and be as semantically related to non-auxiliary functions of the same verbs, as well as suggesting a unified analysis for the range of forms that show ‘past’ participle morphology. We then look at how tense and mood are analysed in terms of a grounding predication, and receive a semantic account in terms of the epistemic model (section 18.3). We also see that the polysemy of modal verbs can be accounted for in force dynamic terms. Finally, we look in detail at Langacker’s account of lexical aspect in verbs, which Langacker describes in terms of two broad categories: perfective PROCESSES and imperfective PROCESSES (section 18.4). This aspectual dis tinction is accounted for in a similar way to the count and mass noun distinction: in terms of the nature of the component parts of the PROCESS and in terms of bounding.