ENGLISH VERBS. A PRACTICAL GRAMMAR

English Verbs is a descriptive grammar of the English verb system, and is an overview of the English tenses, grammatical aspect, mood (active and passive), finite and non-finite constructions, and the entire modal system. Specifically, the chapters are dedicated to the present tense (simple and progressive), the past tense (singulative and iterative), the present perfect in its two manifestations of resultative past and “up-to-now” past, the modal system in its three areas of epistemic, deontic and dynamic, and intensive work on areas of difficulty in modal verbs for the Italian student, the five forms of the future, conditionals, direct and indirect discourse (and future/modality in the past, with stylistic considerations of (free) indirect discourse in narrative), non-finite verbs, catenative verb structures (-ing and to-infinitive), and phrasal verbs. At all times the area of grammar under observation is described in terms of structure and usage. The approach is Italian-language specific, and while it is not overtly so (there is no recourse to Italian as the language of explanation), the approach is contrastive all the same, the material included (explanations, examples, reading passages, exercises) being a distillation of work done over many years with advanced Italian students of English. A key to the exercises is provided at the back of the book.