Tenses and Aspects in English

Drawing on the sources and our conversation history, let’s review tenses and aspects in English. Understanding these concepts is underlined as very important for looking at different forms of verbs and how they work in a sentence. Gaining this understanding, particularly of how it works in the human mind’s subconscious computation, can help you achieve accuracy and build communicative confidence in speaking.

In English, we talk about verbs having forms which indicate both tense and aspect.

• Tense primarily codes information about the time of an action or event.
• Aspect describes the state of an action or event.

While tense and aspect often come together, they have different functions. Tense is more general and can appear without aspects, but aspects have to appear only when you have an event (a verb) and the tense.

Tenses

There are three main tenses:

• Present: Talks about time now. Marked by auxiliaries like ‘is’.
• Past: Refers to a time while ago. Marked by auxiliaries like ‘was’. The difference between a present and past tense sentence can be seen in the auxiliary verb, e.g., ‘Ramu is in Chennai’ vs. ‘Ramu was in Chennai’.
• Future: Refers to sometime from now. Marked by auxiliaries like ‘will’.

Auxiliary verbs serve as markers of tense.

Aspects

The state of an event is described through aspect markers. The sources outline four possible states:

1. Indefinite or Habitual:

   • This aspect describes a state which may be habitual or indefinite.
   • In the present tense, this aspect may have no marking on the verb. There might be a marking for number (e.g., -s in third person singular present) but this is not a tense or aspect marker.
   • In the past tense, the verb form changes (e.g., ‘see’ becomes ‘saw’). This change indicates the past tense. In past indefinite, there isn’t typically agreement marking (e.g., ‘I saw’, ‘you saw’, ’they saw’).
   • In the future tense, ‘will’ or ‘shall’ are used (e.g., ‘Ramu will come’, ‘we shall meet’). Like past indefinite, future indefinite cases do not show agreement or aspect marking.
   • The sources provide examples across present, past, and future tenses for the indefinite/habitual aspect.

2. Continuous or Progressive:

   • This aspect talks about the continuity embedded as the state of the action.
   • It uses an auxiliary verb, typically a form of ‘be’ (‘am’, ‘is’, ‘are’, ‘was’, ‘were’, ‘will be’, ‘shall be’), followed by the main verb with an ’-ing’ ending.
   • The auxiliary verb carries the tense and agreement marking. The ‘-ing’ ending is the marker of continuity.
   • This aspect allows us to describe actions that are ongoing, or in the future, something that has not started or completed yet but will be in continuity at some point.

3. Perfective or Perfect:

   • This aspect describes the state of an event which is complete or perfected. It’s not about philosophical perfectness, but that the event is finished.
   • It uses the auxiliary verb ‘have’ (in its various forms: ‘have’, ‘has’, ‘had’, ‘will have’, ‘shall have’) followed by the past participle form of the main verb.
   • The perfect aspect allows you to show completion in present time (e.g., ‘I have played nicely’), past time (e.g., ‘Ramu had eaten dinner’), or future time (e.g., ‘They will have completed the work’).

4. Perfect Continuous:

   • This is described as one of the most complex aspects.
   • It indicates both perfection and continuity.
   • It uses the structure ‘have been’ followed by the ’-ing’ form of the main verb (e.g., ‘will have been playing nicely’, ‘shall have been typing a mail’).

Verb Forms and Markers

• Verbs can have regular forms (adding ‘-ed’ for past tense and past participle, e.g., ‘act’ -> ‘acted’) or irregular forms (which change in different ways, e.g., ‘see’ -> ‘saw’ -> ‘seen’, ‘go’ -> ‘went’ -> ‘gone’, ‘cut’ -> ‘cut’ -> ‘cut’, ‘become’ -> ‘became’ -> ‘become’).
• The ‘-ed’ ending can mark the past tense or a participle.
• Auxiliary verbs like ‘am’, ‘are’, ‘was’, ‘were’ are part of the verb forms.

Practice

To better understand and apply these concepts, the sources suggest an exercise: Write down 20 simple sentences in English and check the tense marking in each one. After learning about the different aspects, you can revisit these sentences to see which ones fit the descriptions provided. This application helps you feel more confident and “on top of these things”.

In summary, mastering the use of tenses and aspects, along with understanding how our minds process these linguistic components, is a key step towards achieving greater accuracy and communicative confidence in English.