Modern Kazakh Verb "is" Grammatical Category - Form And Its Significance

Grammatical category refers to "the abstract summary and classification of the general grammatical meanings encompassed in the same grammatical phenomenon." According to this definition, it is possible to generalize all the grammatical meanings into one grammatical category. Therefore, in order to rebuild a comprehensive and complete category system of "tense" for Kazakh verbs in the perspective of modern linguistics, it is necessary to contain in this system all the grammatical meanings of "tense" expressed by all different grammatical approaches. Besides, it is also important to explicitly describe all the grammatical approaches which could express the grammatical meanings of "tense", as well as the types, forms and meanings of those grammatical approaches. Based on the achievements of previous studies, this thesis is a positive exploration of redefining and reclassifying the types of Kazakh verbs, with an emphasis on their notional and pragmatic functions. In Kazakh, the same grammatical meaning could be expressed by different grammatical forms. In other words, different grammatical forms can express close or similar grammatical meanings. According to the opinion that different grammatical forms contains different grammatical meanings, this thesis is to clearly describe the different grammatical forms which express the same meaning of "tense" and to find out their notional characteristics, and then to point out their pragmatic differences which means the differences in their distributions and national meanings. This is the main task of this thesis.For a long time, the studies on the tense of verbs in grammar mainly emphasize on their grammatical characteristics, such as the changes of their forms, their syntactic and semantic characteristics. As a microscopic and static research methodology, it has inevitably neglected the mechanism and nature of changing of the tense in use. However, in pragmatics the generative process of a language is studied through the factors of language use, including context, reference, presupposition, implicature, and speech acts, etc. Regarding the tense of verbs, their grammatical characteristics and rules are only reflected in the surface structure; however, language capability itself is unlikely to comprehensively explain the function of tense in the generative process of language, because in deep structure this process is controlled by pragmatic and semantic functions of language. This thesis is a preliminary attempt to discuss the tense of verbs of Kazakh language in perspective of pragmatics.