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).
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.
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.
When I get home the children are doing their homework.
- for
something which we think is temporary:
- 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?
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.
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.
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).