Stylistic Potential of Verbal Categories
The category of tense. The use of the present tense forms in narrations about past or future events was called by O.Jesperson the Historic or Dramatic present In a lively emotional narrative Historic/Dramatic present is used to create the effect of the readers’ presence in the situations described, to make their description more vivid. A similar effect is achieved by the use of Continuous tense forms if compared to non-Continuous as they are more emotionally coloured.
e.g., Ruth: You are burning yourself out! And for what?
. George: You don’t even begin to understand – you’re no different from the rest. Burning myself out! You bet I’m burning myself out! I’ve been doing that for so many years now – and who in hell cares?
Everybod y’s being so damned considerate. (I.Shaw)
One day when I ’m no longer spending my days running a sweet-stall, I may write a book about us all. (Osborne)
To express irony or dissatisfaction a special grammatical form, i.e. a question containing continuous tense forms, is combined with a specific intonation pattern, e.g., You are not really suggesting that, are you? You are not trying to convince me that…? Sometimes continuous forms are used for the sake of revealing more politeness on the part of the speaker, e.g., I’d better show you the way. He is not feeling so good today.
From the point of view of functional stylistics it is important to mention the grammatical forms characteristic of spoken colloquial English: I/he/we ain’t, I says ( for past events), the use of ‘has, is, was’ with the subject in Plural, etc., such forms add to local or historical colouring of characters’ speech.
Archaic verbal forms used in fiction create either the atmosphere of a historical epoch or refer to dialects in which the forms survived. These are:
2nd person sing., present – dost, knowest, livest, hast
3rd person sing., present - doth, knoweth, liveth
Past – hadst, didst
A separate group of verbs possesses a great emotional power, these are modal verbs which normally convey the speaker’s attitude to what he is speaking about, expressing possibility, desirability, necessity, etc. of the actions described.
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