Looking at tenses and the ways in which they are used.

I AM a follower of Fadzilah Amin’s question-and-answer sessions for Mind Our English. I cannot help but feel for the considerable number of readers who occasionally submit questions about their confusion in the use of tenses. Fadzilah Amin is, of course, fully right to say (MOE, Dec 16, 2010) that “explaining all the English tenses ... would take at least a chapter of a book, if not a whole book.”

It would be presumptuous of me, in this article, to even think that I could cover the subject within the space constraint of one tabloid page. Rather, here I am just putting together some pointers in the hope that these would be of some help to the said readers.

Look at the cartoon above. Note that it is possible – but only just – to narrate something using basically one sound. It is possible because the words have to be said with the correct intonation (for Chinese, whose script is ideographic, is a tonal language) and in a special context. Granted, the given example is an extreme one, and there surely cannot be another sentence of a similar type.

In English, with an alphabetic script, the verb carries the sense or meaning of the word by adding inflectional suffixes (talk/talked, hear/heard, burn/burnt), by changing form (speak/spoke, go/went), and by the use of appropriate auxiliary verbs (go/will go, run/would run, did say, did not go, has spoken). There is, furthermore, an associated time element which is not necessarily indicated by a time marker such as “now”, “yesterday”, “last week”, “next year”, etc. Tense, in the grammatical sense, performs the function of indicating or incorporating a time element.

A verb is “a word used to describe an action, state, or occurrence”. It is helpful to consider a state or an action as occurring at a point in time or, generally, within one of three time-frames. The simple tenses are as shown in Table 1.

What about a continuing state or action, what about an event that is in progress? Such event is said to be in the continuous tense – also called progressive tense or imperfect tense. The verb form takes on the –ing inflectional suffix. There are three continuous tenses, as shown in Table 2.

What about a state or action that is completed? Such tense is called the perfect tense. As usual, there are three perfect tenses, each indicated by the auxiliary verb had, has, and will have, as shown in the second table.

A note about the present perfect tense

The present perfect tense is one that may cause some problem because it may straddle two time-frames – an event may begin in a “past” time-frame and be completed in a “present” time-frame. Such event may even represent a fully past occurrence. In fact, the past simple tense and the present perfect tense, in Latin, are represented by the same verb form, e.g. amavit “he loved” or “he has loved”.

The problem with the verb ‘to have’

The verb “had” causes problems when one simply makes a statement like “I had gone to school” out of context (when he should say “I have gone to school”), or when one comes across a double “had” as in “He invited her out for dinner but she said that she already had had hers” (No, not a mistaken repetition of the word “had”).

In such situation, one bears in mind that the verb “to have” – like the verb “to do” – can be both a lexical verb (one that carries the meaning) as well as an auxiliary verb (one that, in the context of this article, forms the tense). Example: (1) they do their homework/ they did their homework/ they did do their homework (in the first two examples of the set, “do” and its past simple form “did” are lexical verbs, but “did” in the third example is an auxiliary verb); and (2) I always have my lunch in this canteen/ I cannot join you for lunch because I have already had mine/ He invited her for lunch knowing full well that she already had had hers (in the third example in the set, the verb “had had” is in the past perfect tense, the second “had” being the lexical verb and the first “had” being the auxiliary verb forming the tense).

In short, the past perfect tense, also called the pluperfect tense, denotes an event – whether specified or implied – completed in the past, i.e. before the “past simple” time-frame or the “present perfect” time-frame. In English, it is formed by the auxiliary verb “had” plus the past participle of the particular verb.

Sequence of tenses

Simply put, the term “sequence of tenses” says that the reporting verb in a main clause – whether in the past, the present, or the future – determines the tense of the verbs in the subordinate clause. Examples: (1) the teacher says that it is wrong to steal (reporting verb “says” in simple present tense, followed by verb “is” in present tense); (2) in olden times, people believed that the world was flat (both reporting verb “believed” and following verb “was” are in simple past tense); (3) she said that she would go to the concert (reporting verb “said” in simple past tense, followed by verb “would go” in the future but with the auxiliary verb “would” to form the past tense in accordance with the reporting verb); (4) the teacher taught us that the world is round (the world is actually spherical, not round as per the usual expression – but the point I’m really making is that here the reporting verb “taught” is in the past tense but the following verb “is” is in the present tense. The subordinate clause is correctly in the present tense when the situation still exists or, in the given example, the event or statement is a universal truth.

What if the event or statement happened before the report or narration? For such situation, a backshift is performed (Chalker, S. & Weiner, E., 1998. Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar), as in the modified example: “Mark said that he was sorry that he had not asked them yet” – where “said” is the reporting verb in the simple past tense; “was”, the verb in the subordinate clause, accords with the simple past tense of the reporting verb; and “had asked”, the verb in the complementary clause after the word “sorry”, is in the past perfect tense, i.e. in the time-frame previous to that of the reporting verb.

Chalker and Weiner (loc. cit.) write that backshift is sometimes known as the sequence of tense rule. I have nagging thoughts about the two terms: sequence (of tenses) seemingly suggests a chronological sequence whereas backshift a reverse chronological order.

I suggest reconciling the two notions into a guideline which I conveniently call the assignment of tenses. With a guideline, I find it easy, when writing out or dealing with long passages, to properly compartmentalise all the finite verbs within the appropriate time-frames and accord them the appropriate tenses. Consider, as an example, a very recent excerpt (The Star, Jan 1, page N23): “He added that the 194-page publication, which is an extract of a thesis he had written, did not question the policies of the party’s struggles.” The four verbs (underlined), each correct in its tense, can be aptly placed in their appropriate time-frames. Try applying this guideline to the wordplay below.

Closing remarks

So far we have talked about verbs in the indicative mood, active voice. The same considerations hold for the passive voice. Verbs in the imperative mood should pose no problem because they all fall within the “present” time-frame. Verbs in the subjunctive mood are another matter (see MOE, May 21, 2010).

I should like to close with the morpheme/phoneme/word “saw” in the following sentence, recalled from childhood memory, thus: “I once saw a saw in Warsaw, and of all the saws I saw, I never saw the big saw which I saw in Warsaw.” The sentence may pass off as a clever example of wordplay, but it cannot pass muster in grammar. I would suggest amending it to: “I once saw a saw in Warsaw, and of all the saws that I had seen, I have never seen the big saw which I saw in Warsaw.” My amended version is perhaps 90% right and 10% wrong. Wrong or right, I am left undecided. Could readers please come up with a better version?

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