- The waveswere glistening.(predicate adjective)
- Buggsywas watchingfrom the deck of his beach house. (progressive verb form)
- He found that the sight of all the happy peoplewas tiring.(predicate adjective)
Perfect Verb Forms
The perfect verb form in English consists ofhaveand a verb to which the
past participle suffix-ed/-enhas been attached. It signifies more than one
temporal relation.
- The past perfect,for example, indicates that one event occurred before an-
other event. - The present perfectindicates that an event has recurred or that it already has
occurred. - The future perfectindicates that an event will have occurred by the time that
another event will be happening.
These three possibilities, respectively, are illustrated in the following sentences:- Fredhad eatenat Spago many times before that fateful day. (past perfect)
- Macarenahas lookedeverywhere for the diskette. (present perfect)
- Fritzwill have driven150 miles before dark. (future perfect)
Like the progressive, the perfect verb form is analyzed as part of the auxil-
iary; we abbreviate it here asperf .Making the necessary adjustment to the
phrase-structure rule results in:
AuxÆtense (M) (DO) (prog) (perf)PerfÆhave -ed/-enPossessives
English forms the possessive using pronouns or a noun and a possessive (poss)
marker, as inher bookorMaria’s book. Possessives are considered to be in the
category of determiners. To this point, our discussion of determiners has in-
cluded only articles, but now we need to expand our notion of this grammatical
category. We can describe the nature of possessives by using an expression
such as the following:
PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR 133