 #1 (permalink) Sun Dec 18, 2011 10:43 am The tenses |
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Funny things, tenses, aren’t they? Come to think of it, so’s the word ‘tense’. When it’s used as an adjective , it describes how you feel when you’re holding your breath in anticipation as when opening an envelope to see whether you’ve passed your exam or got the job you applied for. Question is: How come it’s used to describe something to do with verbs and time? Well, I am going to show off a bit here. ‘Tense’ as an adjective comes from the Latin verb ‘tendere’ that means to stretch and when we are talking about the noun, it also comes from the Latin ‘tempus’ and means ‘time’. So now we know.
But of course that’s only the start of this tense tense business. I mean it’s the names we give to these tenses. Take ‘perfect’ for example. The first idea that ‘perfect’ the adjective suggests is that everything is just how you like it and there are no problems at all. We talk of a perfect day when everything went according to plan But when we say ‘the perfect tense’, we are not talking about a tense that is absolutely lovely, are we? I am afraid we have to go back to the Latin again because this tense is so called because it tells us that something is finished and completed. So far, so good. Then we have to remember that the real name is ‘present perfect’. That seems a little odd, doesn’t it? The present and the perfect going hand in hand? Let’s take some examples: I have read that book. I have visited China. We have met the Queen. Now in all these sentences the events described are in the past and are therefore completed. What we don’t know is when any of these ‘happenings’ took place. For that reason we add on the auxiliary ‘have’ to indicate that these events or happenings are, as it were, floating in the air and can’t be pinned down to one particular time. I haven’t of course given this ‘perfect tense’ its full name which is ‘present perfect simple’. And that means that it has another aspect called the present perfect continuous. This I believe is the most expressive of all the tenses in English because it looks three ways at the same time. It suggests a reference to the past, it talks about the present and then it points in the direction of the future. When I say that I have been writing this text for thirty minutes, you understand that I started thirty minutes ago, I am writing it now and I am going on to write some more. Well, not a lot more. This tense covers all these times and doesn’t indicate completion as does the ‘simple’ form but still has the flavour of an action hanging in the air. If there is interest enough, I’ll go on another time to talk of other tenses.
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English as a Second Language
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Alan
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Joined: 27 Sep 2003
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Location: UK
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Yuri Yurinov
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