The functional load of English tense-aspect modifications

Abstract

While it is true that, as a form class, the verb is very important in English, it has its own modifications which must be analyzed for their usefulness as shown in a frequency count of these modifications.

This phase of the investigation deals with the following problems: 1. What are the most useful English tense-aspect modifications? That is, which ones have the highest functional load? 2. What are the most common sentence patterns in which these modifications occur? 3. What are the more common transformations by which the source strings get embedded into the resultant transforms as clauses?