Table Of ContentMeaning and the English Verb
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Meaning and the
English Verb
Third Edition
Geoffrey Leech
O Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK
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First published 2004 by Pearson Education Limited
Published 2013 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © 1971, 1987, 2004, Taylor & Francis.
The right of Geoffrey Leech to be identified as author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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in writing from the publishers.
Notices
Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience
broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical
treatment may become necessary.
Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in
evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In
using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of
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instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.
ISBN: 978-0-582-78457-4 (pbk)
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Leech, Geoffrey N.
Meaning and the English verb / Geoffrey Leech. — 3rd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–582–78457–3 (pbk.)
1. English language—Verb. 2. English language—Textbooks for foreign
speakers. I. Title.
PE1271.L4 2004
428.2′4—dc22
2004040107
Set by 35 in 9/12pt Stone Serif
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Key to Symbols vii
Preface to Third Edition viii
Introduction 1
1 Simple Present and Past Tenses 5
2 Progressive Aspect 18
3 The Expression of Past Time 35
4 The Expression of Future Time 55
5 The Primary Modal Auxiliaries 72
6 Modality Continued 90
7 Indirect Speech 107
8 Mood: Theoretical and Hypothetical Meaning 114
Further Reading 133
Index 138
v
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful
l to Valerie Adams for reading through and commenting on the earlier
chapters of this book
l to the late Sidney Greenbaum for chapter-by-chapter comments, and
for kindly undertaking some research on American English
l to R.A. Close, for a careful reading of the manuscript with a
particular eye to the needs of the foreign learner
l to Paul James Portland for detailed observations from the point of
view of the speaker of American English
l to Julia Youst and Susan Conrad for kindly helping me in advising
on American English for the third edition
l to Nicholas I. Smith for reading and commenting on the third
edition of this book, and in advising on the compilation of the
Further Reading section. I am also grateful for the help Nicholas
Smith has given me during 1999–2004, in researching recent
grammatical change in English, concentrating on the verb
l the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the British Academy,
for the funding of the research just mentioned
GNL
Lancaster University, 2004
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Key to Symbols
bwill:
The bar b indicates that the following syllable is stressed.
*It has rained tomorrow:
The asterisk * indicates an unacceptable or ‘non-English’ piece of
language.
?*He is being ill:
The ?* indicates that an utterance is marginally unacceptable.
(have) got to:
The brackets are sometimes used to mark elements that can be omitted.
Simple Present:
The initial capitals indicate a grammatical category.
‘possibility’:
The quotation marks indicate a semantic category or explanation of
meaning.
AmE: American English
BrE: British English
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Preface to
Third Edition
It is now over thirty years since the first edition of this book was pub-
lished in 1971. Like the second edition (1987), this new edition has been
thoroughly revised and updated to take account of relevant new research,
which has been plentiful in recent years. The book has been thoroughly
revised, but those who are familiar with the second or even the firstedition
will find little difficulty, I believe, in adapting to the changes made in the
third edition.
Another kind of updating needed is that of keeping up with a language
undergoing change. It is easy to assume that major grammatical areas of
the language such as tense, aspect and modality remain the same from
one generation to another, or at least change only very slowly. In part,the
contrary seems to be the case. In the period 1961 to 1991, from corpus
studies undertaken by Nicholas Smith and myself as well as others,1 it
appears that modal auxiliaries and some other constructions have been
gradually changing. The modals, except for will and would, decreased
significantly in frequency between the 1960s and the 1990s – and part of
this was apparently due to the decline or obsolescence of certain uses of
modals – for example, the must of obligation and the may of permission.
Conversely ‘semi-modals’ such as be going to and need to have been in-
creasing in frequency. In spite of evolving usage, there are of course many
aspects of the grammar and semantics of the verb which show little or no
change since 1971.
It seems strange, but perhaps not unsurprising in view of the above
paragraph, that the major changes in this edition are similar in scope and
grouping to changes made for the second edition in 1987: they stem
particularly from what has been newly learned about modal auxiliaries
and comparable constructions. Thus Chapters 1–4 of the book are com-
paratively unchanged: there are hundreds of minor changes andadditions,
1 See, for example, Leech (2003), Mair and Hundt (1995) and Smith (2001, 2003) in
the Further Reading section at the end of the book.
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PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION
but very few major ones. Chapter 5, on the other hand, has been more
extensively rewritten, taking account of new work on the modal auxili-
aries, as well as corpus findings. Incidentally, this chapter, which was
twice as long as the average chapter in the earlier editions, has now been
subdivided into two separate chapters, to make this part of the book
more manageable for the user. Chapter 7 (previously numbered 6) is, like
Chapters 1–4, relatively unchanged, but in Chapter 8 there have been
many small revisions and some substantial revisions consequential on the
new look at the modals. Exemplification has been improved. Hundreds
of examples have been replaced or added, many new examples coming
from electronic corpuses such as the Freiburg-Lancaster-Oslo/BergenCorpus
of written English (1991), the Freiburg-Brown Corpus of written American
English (1992), the Longman Corpus of American Conversation (early
1990s) and the British National Corpus (mainly 1991 ± 3 years), as well
as more recent Internet sources. (The dates refer to the years when the
corpus data was produced.) Usually the examples from corpus data have
been adapted to make them simpler and more suitable for illustrative
purposes.
As for section numbering, the first half of the book (up to §90) hassection
numbers corresponding to those of the second edition. With the addition
of new material, however, the section numbering has been augmented
slightly from here on, so that by the end of the book, we have reached
§186, as compared with §177 in the previous edition. The Further Reading
section (pp. 133–7) has been thoroughly updated and expanded.
Re-reading the book after thirty years with a new critical awareness, I
noticed a stodgy, overly academic flavour in many of its sentences, andhave
taken this opportunity to make the style simpler and more congenial.These
stylistic adjustments reflect another way in which the English languagehas
been changing over the generation’s time-span since this book’s original
publication.
GNL
Lancaster University,
March 2004
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