EXTENDED STRUCTURES OF THE VERBAL GROUP
The features of grammatical meaning which can be expressed in an extended VG comprise the following pairs, of which tense, finiteness, polarity and contrastiveness are obligatory:
tense past, present
finiteness non-finite, finite
anteriority perfect, non-perfect
aspect progressive, non-progressive
modality modal, non-modal
polarity negative, positive
emphasis contrastive, non-contrastive
These major features of grammatical meaning represent sets of options between which speakers choose every time they combine elements to form a Verbal Group.
The following extract from a story by Raymond Carver in Cathedral uses the options of tense (put, went, opened, came, was) all past; perfect + past (had melted, had gotten), modality + past + negative (couldn’t believe); finiteness: all finite except to get and the participles melted, run, gotten, pooled ( boxed-in is adjectival); all positive polarity except for couldn’t; all non-contrastive:
She put her purse on the table and went over to the fridge to get herself some yogurt. But when she opened the door, warm, boxed-in air came out at her. She couldn’t believe the mess inside. The ice-cream from the freezer had melted and run down into the leftover fish sticks and coleslaw. The ice cream had gotten into the bowl of Spanish rice and pooled on the bottom of the fridge. Ice cream was everywhere.
An ‘extended’ Verbal Group structure consists of a lexical verb at the head, preceded by up to four auxiliaries – five if we include the lexical auxiliaries. The order in which the auxiliaries occur is fixed and depends upon the grammatical meanings they convey.
The auxiliaries serve to build up the meanings expressed by the modal, perfect, progressive and passive combinations, operating not in isolation but each telescoping with the next, as is explained shortly. In the following examples, we let has and is stand for any form of have and be, must for any of the modal auxiliaries and be about to for the set of lexical auxiliaries.
