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I got confused with the rule of the sequence of tenses. I found that when the action in the subordinate clause is a habitual action or general truth, we can use the present tense in the clause even if the time it the main clause is Past.
"I knew you are a kind man"
But what if I want to express an action that is still true, but is not a habit/truth, but a temporary process expressed with the Continuous Tense:
"I knew you are reading a book now"
Is it correct too?
Thanks.
Questions about "sequence of tenses" often come up, here, because, for one thing, English appears to be changing in this regard. It makes it especially difficult to deal with, since native speakers do not necessarily agree about what is grammatical English. Being a rather old person, I speak a conservative version of English which generally requires sequence of tenses to be followed. For your example, "I knew you are a kind man", I would have to say, instead, "I knew you were a kind man". Personally, I allow present tenses embedded in the complements of past tense verbs only in the case of truisms in indirect discourse: "Henrietta emphasized that the earth still revolves about the Sun."
I have a theory about recent, more liberal dialects, and that is this: Apparent sequence of tense violations are permissible when the main verb can be interpreted as a parenthetical expression which somehow qualifies the assertion made by the complement sentence. Specifically, for your first example, I think "I knew you are a kind man" is okay, in recent English, because it is interpreted to mean "You are a kind man, as I knew." That is, the assertion made is "You are a kind man", and the "I knew" part is just a qualifier -- a sort of adverb.
So then, for your second example,
I knew you are reading a book now"
my prediction for neo-English, is that this will be grammatical if and to the extent that it can be interpreted to mean "You are reading a book now, as I knew." It's a task for the imagination to figure out the situation in which you would say such a thing, but if you can do that, your example sentence should sound okay.
"I knew you must be watching."
is used by two great writers here.
Generally, in English, it's the past that's highly preferred to go with the past tense. See in published books listed at Google Books:
"I knew you were"
About 3,970,000 results
"I knew you are"
About 136 results
As to one of your sentences, showing in one comment, that should be:
"I thought you were playing games, but you are doing your homework instead."
if you really feel the need to switch verbal context.
