Basic qualities of the perfect forms — страница 6

experience summed up and ready at the time of speaking. With the past tense, the sentence merely deals with events of a past time unconnected with the present, whereas with the present perfect there is the additional meaning of all those past events being alive in the speaker's mind. 4 Б. A. Ильиш 98 The Verb: The Perfect Other examples might of course be found in which there is some peculiarity or other in the use of a perfect form. In the course of time, if such varied uses accumulate, they may indeed bring about a modification of the meaning of the form itself. This, however, lies beyond the scope of our present study. The three verbal categories considered so far — aspect, tense, and correlation — belong together in the sense that the three express facets of the

action closely connected, and could therefore even occasionally be confused and mistaken for each other. There is also some connection, though of a looser kind, between these three and some other verbal categories which we will now consider, notably that of mood and that of voice. We will in each case point out the connections as we come upon them.