GRAMMATICAL MEANS OF EXPRESSING VERB TENSE IN THE MODERN MONGOLIAN LANGUAGE

Abstract

The article describes grammatical forms of verb tense expression in the modern Mongolian language. In the Mongolian language verbs are used to indicate the category of time by means of the grammatical forms of the past, present and future tenses, characterize the action that was defined by the verb, relative to the moment of speech. Thus, in the Mongolian language, the past tense is expressed by the indicative forms of the verb with the help of the affixes -v, -laa (-lae, -loo, -lou), -jee/-che. There is no consensus among Mongol linguists regarding the use of these affixes. The article addresses an analysis of the opinions of researchers on this issue. In the research, the author substantiates the necessity to consider the verb tense using the modal meaning of “known” and “unknown” of the communicated information of the speaker. The research results presented in the article confirm that these modal meanings are the main factor for distinguishing not only the forms of the past tense, but also the entire category of tense verbs of the modern Mongolian language.