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67
of speech". If we say, "I never take his advice", we mean linguistically "at no time in terms of the current state
of my attitude towards him, and so at the present moment". If we say, "In our millennium social formations
change quicker than in the previous periods of man's history", the linguistic temporal content of it is "in our
millennium, that is, in the millennium including the moment of speech". This meaning is the invariant of the
present, developed from its categorial opposition to the past, and it penetrates the uses of the finite verb in all its
forms, including the perfect, the future, the continuous.
Indeed, if the radio carries the news, "The two suspected terrorists have been taken into custody by the
police", the implication of the moment of speech refers to the direct influence or after-effects of the event
announced. Similarly, the statement "You will be informed about the decision later in the day" describes the
event, which, although it has not yet happened, is prospected into the future from the present, i.e. the
prospection itself incorporates the moment of speech. As for the present continuous, its relevance for the
present moment is self-evident.
Thus, the analysed meaning of the verbal present arises as a result of its immediate contrast with the past
form which shows the exclusion of the action from the plane of the present and so the action itself as capable of
being perceived only in temporal retrospect. Again, this latter meaning of the disconnection from the present
penetrates all the verbal forms of the past, including the perfect, the future, the continuous. Due to the marked
character of the past verbal form, the said quality of its meaning does not require special demonstration.
Worthy of note, however, are, utterances where the meaning of' the past tense stands in contrast with the
meaning of some adverbial phrase referring the event to the present moment. Cf.:
Today again I spoke to Mr. Jones on the matter, and again he  failed to see the urgency of it.
The seeming linguistic paradox of such cases consists exactly in the fact that their two-type indications of
time, one verbal-grammatical, and one adverbial-lexical, approach the same event from two opposite angles.
But there is nothing irrational here. As a matter of fact, the utterances present instances of two-plane temporal
evaluation of the event described: the verb-form shows the process as past and gone, i.e. physically
disconnected from the present; as, for the adverbial modifier, it presents the past event as a particular'happen-
ing, belonging to a more general time situation which is stretched out up to the present moment inclusive, and
possibly past the present moment into the future.
A case directly opposite to the one shown above is seen in the transpositional use of the present tense of
the verb with the past adverbials, either included in the utterance as such, or else expressed in its contextual
environment. E.g.:
Then he turned the corner, and what do you think happens next? He faces nobody eke than Mr. Greggs
accompanied by his private secretary!
The stylistic purpose of this transposition, known under the name of the "historic present" (Lat. praesens
historicum) is to create a vivid picture of the event reflected in the utterance. This is achieved in strict accord
with the functional meaning of the verbal, present, sharply contrasted against the general background of the
past plane of the utterance content.
§ 4. The combinations of the verbs shall and will with the infinitive have of late become subject of
renewed discussion. The controversial point about them is whether these combinations really constitute,
together with the forms of the past and present, the categorial expression of verbal tense, or are just modal
phrases, whose expression of the future time does not differ in essence from the general future orientation of
other combinations of modal verbs with the infinitive. The view that shall and will retain their modal mean-
ings in all their uses was defended by such a recognized authority on English grammar of the older generation
of the twentieth century linguists as O. Jespersen. In our times, quite a few scholars, among them the
successors of Descriptive Linguistics, consider these verbs as part of the general set of modal verbs, "modal
auxiliaries", expressing the meanings of capability, probability, permission, obligation, and the like.
A well-grounded objection against the inclusion of the construction shall/will + Infinitive in the tense system
of the verb on the same basis as the forms of the present and past has been advanced by L. S. Barkhudarov
[, 1975, 126 ff.j. His objection consists in the demonstration of the double marking of this would-be
tense form by one and the same category: the combinations in question can express at once both the future time
and the past time (the form "future-in-the-past"), which hardly makes any sense in terms of a grammatical
category. Indeed, the principle of the identification of any grammatical category demands that the forms of the
category in normal use should be mutually exclusive. The category is constituted by the opposition of its forms,
not by their co-position!
   However, reconsidering the status of the construction shall/will + Infinitive in the light of oppositional
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