Grammaticals

Present Perfect

The present perfect is a grammatical combination of the present tense and the perfect aspect, used to express a past event that has present consequences. The term is used particularly in the context of English grammar, where it refers to forms such as "I have left" and "Sue has died". These forms are present because they use the present tense of the auxiliary verb have, and perfect because they use that auxiliary in combination with the past participle of the main verb. (Other perfect constructions also exist, such as the past perfect: "I had eaten.")

Analogous forms are found in some other languages, and these may also be described as present perfects, although they often have other names, such as the German Perfekt and the French passé composé. They may also have different ranges of usage – for example, in both of the languages just mentioned, the forms in question serve as a general past tense, at least for completed actions. In English, completed actions in many contexts are referred to using the simple past verb form rather than the present perfect.

English also has a present perfect progressive (or present perfect continuous) form, which combines present tense with both perfect aspect and progressive(continuous) aspect: "I have been eating". In this case the action is not necessarily complete; the same is true of certain uses of the basic present perfect when the verb expresses a state or a habitual action: "I have lived here for five years."

In modern English, the auxiliary verb for forming the present perfect is always to have. A typical present perfect clause thus consists of the subject, the auxiliaryhave/has, and the past participle (third form) of the main verb. Examples:

• I have eaten some food.
• You have gone to school.
• He has already arrived in Catalonia.
• He has had child after child... (The Mask of Anarchy, Percy Shelley)
• Lovely tales that we have heard or read... (Endymion (poem), John Keats)

Early Modern English used both to have and to be as perfect auxiliaries. Examples of the second can be found in older texts:

• Madam, the Lady Valeria is come to visit you. (The Tragedy of Coriolanus, Shakespeare)
• Vext the dim sea: I am become a name... (Ulysses, Tennyson)
• Pillars are fallen at thy feet... (Marius amid the Ruins of Carthage, Lydia Maria Child)
• I am come in sorrow. (Lord Jim, Conrad)

In many other European languages, the equivalent of to have (e.g. German haben, French avoir) is used to form the present perfect (or their equivalent of the present perfect) for most or all verbs. However, the equivalent of to be (e.g. German sein, French être) serves as the auxiliary for other verbs in some languages, such as German, Dutch, French, and Italian (but not Spanish or Portuguese). Generally, the verbs that take to be as auxiliary are intransitive verbs denoting motion or change of state (e.g. to arrive, to go, to fall).

For more details, see Perfect constructions with auxiliaries.

Future (will/going to)

The going-to future is a grammatical construction used in English to refer to various types of future occurrences. It is made using appropriate forms of the expression to be going to.^[1] It is an alternative to other ways of referring to the future in English, such as the future construction formed with will (or shall) – in some contexts the different constructions are interchangeable, while in others they carry somewhat different implications.

When we want to talk about future facts or things we believe to be true about the future, we use 'will'.

• The President will serve for four years.
• The boss won't be very happy.
• I'm sure you'll like her.
• I'm certain he'll do a good job.

If we are not so certain about the future, we use 'will' with expressions such as 'probably', 'possibly', 'I think', 'I hope'.

• I hope you'll visit me in my home one day.
• She'll probably be a great success.
• I'll possibly come but I may not get back in time.
• I think we'll get on well.

If you are making a future prediction based on evidence in the present situation, use 'going to'.

• Not a cloud in the sky. It's going to be another warm day.
• Look at the queue. We're not going to get in for hours.
• The traffic is terrible. We're going to miss our flight.
• Be careful! You're going to spill your coffee.

At the moment of making a decision, use 'will'. Once you have made the decision, talk about it using 'going to'.

• I'll call Jenny to let her know. Sarah, I need Jenny's number. I'm going to call her about the meeting.
• I'll come and have a drink with you but I must let Harry know. Harry, I'm going to have a drink with Simon.

Past progressive

The past progressive tense (also sometimes called "past continuous") is formed by usingwas/were + main verb + ing, as in, "We were eating dinner when the phone rang."

We use the past progressive tense to talk about actions that were already in progresswhen another action took place in the past. (At the moment the phone rang, we were already in the process of eating dinner.)

It's also common to use this tense to talk about two on-going actions that were happeningsimultaneously in the past, as in, "While Axl Rose was finishing his new album, his fans were waiting anxiously for it to come out."

Finally, we can also use this tense to talk about actions in the past that took place over time, as in, "I couldn't sleep last night because dogs were barking the whole night."

Present Progressive

The present continuous tense is formed from the present tense of the verb be and the present participle (-ing form) of a verb:

Use

1. We use the present continuous tense to talk about the present:

• for something that is happening at the moment of speaking:

I’m just leaving work. I’ll be home in an hour.
Please be quiet. The children are sleeping.

• for something which is happening before and after a given time:

At eight o’clock we are usually having breakfast.
When I get home the children are doing their homework.

• for something which we think is temporary:

Michael is at university. He’s studying history.
I’m working in London for the next two weeks.

• for something which is new and contrasts with a previous state:

These days most people are using email instead of writing letters.
What sort of clothes are teenagers wearing nowadays? What sort of music are they listening to?

• to show that something is changing, growing or developing:

The children are growing quickly.
The climate is changing rapidly.
Your English is improving.

• for something which happens again and again:

It’s always raining in London.
They are always arguing.
George is great. He’s always laughing.

Past tense

The past tense is a grammatical tense whose principal function is to place an action or situation in past time. In languages which have a past tense, it thus provides a grammatical means of indicating that the event being referred to took place in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs sang, went and was.

In some languages, the grammatical expression of past tense is combined with the expression of other categories such as mood and aspect (see tense–aspect–mood). Thus a language may have several types of past tense form, their use depending on what aspectual or other additional information is to be encoded. French, for example, has a compound past (passé composé) for expressing completed events, an imperfect for expressing events which were ongoing or repeated in the past, as well as several other past forms.

Some languages that mark for past tense do so by inflecting the verb, while others do so periphrastically using auxiliary verbs (and some do both, as in the example of French given above). Not all languages mark verbs for past tense – Mandarin Chinese, for example, mainly uses lexical means (words like "yesterday" or "last week") to indicate that something took place in the past, although use can also be made of the tense/aspect markers le and guo.

The "past time" to which the past tense refers generally means the past relative to the moment of speaking, although in contexts where relative tense is employed (as in some instances ofindirect speech) it may mean the past relative to some other time being under discussion.^[1] A language's past tense may also have other uses besides referring to past time; for example, in English and certain other languages, the past tense is sometimes used in referring to hypothetical situations, such as in condition clauses like If you loved me ..., where the past tense loved is used even though there may be no connection with past time.

Present Tense

The present tense is a grammatical tense whose principal function is to locate a situation or event in present time. The term "present tense" is usually used in descriptions of specific languages to refer to a particular grammatical form or set of forms; these may have a variety of uses, not all of which will necessarily refer to present time. For example, in the English sentence My train leaves tomorrow morning, the verb form leaves is said to be in the present tense, even though in this particular context it refers to an event in future time. Similarly, in the historical present, the present tense is used to narrate events that occurred in the past.

There are two common types of present tense form in most Indo-European languages: the present indicative (the combination of present tense and indicative mood) and the present subjunctive(the combination of present tense and subjunctive mood).