Tense and aspect
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If you've studied English as a second or other language, then you probably think there are quite a few tenses. If you grew up speaking English, you might think there are three. But, in fact, most linguists agree that English has only two tenses: past and present. "That can't be," I imagine you saying. "I talk about the future in English all the time. You can't be serious that it has no future tense."
Tense vs time
This gets to the heart of a very important idea. Tense is a grammatical system. Time is a physical reality. The main meaning of the past tense is "I'm talking about past time," but just as words may have different meanings, so too do tenses. Consider the following examples:
- I went to the store.
- If I went to the store with you, would you buy me chocolate?
The word went is the past tense of go.
(If you've ever wondered about why went is so completely unrelated in form to go, you may be pleased to learn that go used to have a perfectly regular past tense: goed. The Online Etymology Dictionary has this to say about it:
"past tense of go; originally a past tense and past participle of wend (v.), as sent from send. The past tense forms of wend were wende, wended, but variants wente, went developed from c. 1200 and these then began to replace older past tenses of go (v.). By c. 1500 they were fully employed in that function, and wend retained the past tense form wended.")
In (1), it's pretty obvious that past tense means "past time". But in (2), the speaker is talking about a time in their future, not their past. Why, then, do they use the past tense? Because the past tense has this secondary meaning of "unlikely". The speaker means, "it's unlikely that I will go to the store with you, but in a hypothetical situation in which I do go with you, do you end up buying me chocolate?"
Now consider this example.
- And one quiet, beautiful Sunday - spring Sunday morning, we were driving down the street on the backside of Cambridge, it was pretty deserted. And he turns to me, I'm 12 years old, and he says do you want to drive? I almost peed my pants. Man, I was so thrilled. (From a "Fresh Air" episode called "We Have Learned Absolutely Nothing": Tom Magliozzi On Decades Of "Car Talk")
Notice that the story is about something that happened in the past, and almost all the verbs are in the past tense (e.g., were, was, peed) but turns in the underlined section is in the present tense. This use of the present tense here doesn't mean "present time". Instead, it means something like, "this is the key part of my story."
To reiterate, just like words, tenses have a primary meaning that applies most of the time, but they have more than one meaning. Remember, also, that the tenses came first and the name for them came much, much later. The "past tense" and the "present tense" are technical terms and they don't mean exactly the same as the common terms "present" and "past", just like the technical term "plural" doesn't mean the same as the common term "plural". Another way to look at it is to think that they are just labels, and they may not be the best labels. Perhaps it would have been better to call them "tense one" and "tense two" or "past" and "non-past" or – my favorite – "distant" and "close" tense.
You might think that, if English really does just have two tenses, then isn't that weird? In fact, many language have just two tenses (e.g., Japanese and Arabic) while others have no system of tense at all (e.g., Vietnamese and Dyirbal). Some, like English, split time into past and non-past, and still others generally classify time as future and non-future. And you don't have to stop at three tenses either. I've seen claims about six-tense languages. The point is that different languages have found different ways to think about and express time.
So, what about the future?
The so-called "present tense" is really mostly a non-past tense, so when we want to talk about the future, the present tense is usually what we use. You may have heard that will is the future tense, but this is not the right way to think about it. Consider the modal auxiliary verbs:
| Present | Past |
|---|---|
| will | would |
| can | could |
| may | might |
| shall | should |
| must | -- |
Every one of these verbs can be used to talk about future time. There's nothing special about will. It just happens to be the one that expresses the most confidence about the future. And we can use other present-tense verbs too (e.g., my plane leaves at 8:30 tomorrow morning).
Similarly, you may have heard that going to is the future tense, because we say I'm going to see her tomorrow. But, again, there's nothing special about going to. Consider the following examples:
- I'm planning to see her tomorrow.
- I'm hoping to see her tomorrow.
- I'm expecting to see her tomorrow.
- I'm dying to see her tomorrow.
- I'm coming to see her tomorrow.
In each case, I'm has 'm, short for am, which is PRESENT TENSE. And remember (2), which used the past tense to talk about future time.
In short, English has lots of ways to talk about the future. Most of them use the present tense. You don't need a tense to talk about a particular period of time.
But what about all the other "tenses"?
You may be wondering about the present perfect, the past continuous, the past perfect continuous, etc. Aren't those tenses? I'm sure you can guess that I'm going to say, "no."
Along with the two tenses, English has three aspects: simple, perfect, and continuous (also known as progressive).
| Simple | Perfect | Continuous | ||
| Present | I like pizza. | I've liked pizza. | I'm liking this pizza. | |
| Present | She goes to school. | She has gone to school. | She's going to school. | Continuous |
| Past | I liked pizza. | I had liked pizza for many years. | I was liking that pizza. | |
| Past | She went to school. | She had gone to school. | She was going to school. | Continuous |
In fact, the perfect and the continuous can be blended as in she's been watching TV, although this is relatively rare.
Frequency of tense and aspect
As a language teacher, you should be aware that there is a large difference in the frequency with which different tense-aspect combinations appear. As a result, different combinations merit different levels of attention in class.
Both the present and past tenses are very common, but the present tense is about 40% more common than the past tense, except in fiction (Longman grammar of spoken and written English, p. 456). When it comes to aspect, though, there is a much greater difference. The simple aspect is far more frequent than the others, appearing roughly 20 times as often as the continuous – the second most common – in conversation (Biber & Reppen, 2002, p. 204). The past perfect and past progressive are relatively rare.
Tense vs aspect
The difference between tense and aspect is that tense typically locates something in time, while aspect explains how the speaker looks at the way a situation is spread out or develops over time. Consider the following examples:
- I live in Toronto. [present simple]
- I'm living in Toronto. [present progressive]
It's not the case that (9) is correct and (10) is incorrect, any more than it is correct to say that I'm behind you is better than you're in front of me. The difference is in the perspective that the speaker takes on it. The simple aspect in (9) tells us nothing particular about the speaker's perspective, but the progressive, in (10), looks inside of the situation of living, and by doing this, the speaker brings our attention to the fact that this situation could end (e.g., but I might move back to Lagos). The progressive is generally obligatory only when we locate one situation inside another.
- He was driving when he heard the news. [past progressive]
- He jumped into the car and drove when he head the news. [past simple]
In (11), hearing the news is located inside the act of driving. Without the progressive aspect, the two situations occur at different times. This is illustrated in (12), where hearing the news is interpreted as occurring before driving ("He heard the news and then/therefore he drove"). So the progressive spreads out driving in time, so that hearing the news can "fit" inside it. Another way to think of this is that the progressive brings our attention to the fact that the driving situation has not yet ended when the hearing situation took place.
We use the perfect to look back at some situation from the perspective of a given time. If it's the present perfect, it looks back at it from the present time. In (13), you can see that the past tense is totally cut off from the present. The use of now with the past tense sends conflicting signals. In (14), though, those 5 years come up to and include the present, so the use of now is fine, but the use of last year doesn't work.
- I lived in Toronto for 5 years. [past simple]
*I lived in Toronto for five years now. - I have lived in Toronto for 5 years now. [present perfect]
*I have lived in Toronto for five months last year. - I had lived in Toronto for five years. [past perfect]
*I had lived in Toronto for five years now.
In (15), it's looking back from a past point in time, so again, the use of now is inconsistent with the use of the past tense.
It's often not important to locate a situation fully in the past, and when there's nothing else in the sentence, such as sometimes, yesterday, now, last week, etc., connecting the situation to the past or the non-past, we can often choose freely between simple past tense and present progressive as in (16 & 17).
- I fixed the mistake.[past simple]
- I've fixed the mistake. [present perfect]
Similarly, the past perfect looks back from a past point in time, as you can see in (18).
- Several years before that, a certain children's toy company had come into existence.
A special use of the perfect
As we saw above, the modal auxiliary verbs have present and past tense forms, but this is a case where the past tense rarely means past time. Historically, should is the past tense of shall, but should doesn't mean "shall in the past". In fact, the modal auxiliary verbs generally have a futurate meaning. So what do we do if we want to locate something in the past and also use a modal? We use the perfect aspect, as in (19).
- He may have taken a wrong turn.
- It's good to have taken Intro to language.
The underlined section is neither the present perfect nor the past tense; it has no tense at all. But the "looking back" meaning of the perfect aspect allows us to give take a wrong turn a past-time meaning.
Test yourself
Find the verbs From The distance of the moon by Italo Calvino
If you have any questions, make a note of them. Add them to the discussion board or bring them up with a classmate. You can also send an email to Brett or bring it up in class on Tuesday.