The category of Finitude

• Prepared by:
• Alina Horban
• Julia Drobakha
• Victoria Marushchak
“As so many other concepts from our grammatical tradition, the
notion of finiteness is used by everybody and understood by
nobody”
(Wolfhang Klein)

The nature of finiteness has to do with the semantics of

subordination (the asymmetry between dependent and
independent clauses). But other research argues that the
finite/nonfinite opposition is broader because it applies to
independent clauses, too.
FINITENESS appears to be an inflectional category of
the verb, along with tense, person, mood and others.
This idea is problematic for at least two reasons.

First, an inflectional category is not just a set of morphological

changes

Second, in English, all finite forms with very few exceptions such
as swam or are can also be nonfinite forms and in which all
nonfinite forms, except the ing-participle and some irregular forms
such as swum, can also be finite forms.
The syntactic content of the lexico-grammatical
category of finitude is to express verbal
predication.
• All verbal forms fall into two major sets: finite and non-finite.
• The basic difference between the two categories in English is that
finite verbs can function on their own as the core of an independent
sentence, whereas nonfinite verbs cannot. Rather, nonfinite verbs
must ordinarily combine with a modal, an auxiliary verb, or the
infinitival particle to.
A verb's -s form and past tense form are always finite, and the two
participles (the -ing and -en forms) are always nonfinite.

a. Finite verb: ✓ She gives both of them a back rub.

b. ✓ She gave both of them a back rub.

a. Nonfinite verb: ✓ She is giving both of them a back rub.

b. ✓ She has given both of them a back rub.

A verb's bare form can be either finite or nonfinite. Bare forms that express the
present tense are finite; otherwise, they are nonfinite.

Finite verb: ✓ We give both of them a back rub.

a. Nonfinite verb: ✓ We will give both of them a back rub.

b. ✓ We promised to give both of them a back rub.

The finite character of a bare form that expresses the present tense fits with the
following fact. When the subject is replaced by a third-person singular subject, the
bare form of the verb becomes ungrammatical and needs to be replaced by the -
s form.

a. * She give both of them a back rub.

b. ✓ She gives both of them a back rub.

Since the -s form is finite, it is sensible to classify the functionally equivalent

bare form the same way.
Example Verb form Finite?

play-s, see-s 3.sg present tense

play-ed, saw Past tense

yes

Bare (present tense)

play, see
Bare (otherwise)

play-ing, see-ing Present participle

no

play-ed, se-en Past participle

The peculiarity of a finite verb form in general is that one grammatical form is
the bearer of several grammatical meanings , whereas verbids are the forms of the
verb intermediary in many of their lexicogrammatical features between the verb
and non-processual parts of speech.
Verbids serve various syntactic functions in the sentence
 The Infinitive as parenthesis
E.g. To cap misfortune, the postman in his afternoon round brought
him five returned manuscripts. To be quite frank, the speech for me
was mildly funny.
 Gerund as Close Adjunct to a passive verb
E.g. When the door closed, Montecito and I were left looking at each
other. He drew a cartoon for punch in which W. Shakespeare was
shown biting his fingers in front of the boards that advertised my
plays.
Participle
English is rich in compounds in which the second
component is an ing-form such as:
- a tired-looking young woman,
-an active-looking small boy of about three,
-an empty looking station,
-nice-looking people, innocent-appearing
methods,
at breath-taking speed,
- an English-speaking driver in Paris, and a
mind-reading dog.
Finiteness is a property not only of verbs, but also of
clauses.

The finiteness of a clause is determined by the finiteness of its head. For ordinary
clauses, the head is Infl. The only nonfinite Infl element is infinitival to;
all other Infl elements (present or past tense, modals, auxiliary be, do or have) are
finite.
For small clauses, which by definition don't contain I, the head is a nonfinite V. All
small clauses are therefore nonfinite.
 Conclusion
Finites express predication in its complete form, and non-finites
express semi-predication by building a semi-predicative complex
within the sentence.
The formal differential feature (the marker) of the opposition is
constituted by the expression of verbal time and mood, which
underlie the predicative function: having no immediate means of
expressing time and mood categorial semantics, the non-finites are
the weak member of the opposition.
 References
1. Blokh M.Y. A Course in Theoretical English Grammar. -
M.: Vyssaja Sckola, 1983.
2. Morokhovskaya E.J. Fundamentals of English Grammar:
Theory and Practice. -Kyiv: Vysca Skola, 1993.
3. Klein, W. 2006. On Finiteness. In Semantics meets
acquisition, ed. V. van Geenhoven. Dordrecht: Kluwer.