ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on both the structural and semantic properties of the verb group within the clause. It discusses with the properties of English verb forms. The chapter explores what Langacker calls the clausal head, which is a string of verbs that can include a perfect construction, a progressive construction and a passive construction, as well as the content verb. In Cognitive Grammar, the 'past' participle is also semantically related to adjectives that share the same morphology. The chapter looks at the Cognitive Grammar account of tense, aspect and mood, and saw that tense and mood receive a unified semantic characterisation in terms of the epistemic model, and that the polysemy of modals can be accounted for in force-dynamics terms. It also looks at Langacker's account of lexical aspect in verbs, which Langacker describes in terms of two broad categories: perfective processes and imperfective processes.
