187

Non-na­tive speak­ers of­ten get con­fused about what the var­i­ous tens­es and as­pects mean in English. With in­put from some of the folk here I've put to­geth­er a di­a­gram that I hope will pro­vide some clar­i­ty on the mat­ter.

I of­fer it as the first an­swer to this ques­tion. Con­sid­er it a liv­ing doc­u­ment. In­put is wel­come, and good sug­ges­tions will be in­cor­po­rat­ed in­to the di­a­gram.

No­ta bene: What this is not is a dis­cus­sion of whether there are more than two tens­es in English. We have a ded­i­cat­ed ques­tion for that, to which this ques­tion is not in­tend­ed to sup­ply ar­gu­ments one way or the oth­er. Here, the aim is to pro­vide an overview of what con­struc­tions English-speak­ing peo­ple use for con­vey­ing in­for­ma­tion about ac­tions re­fer­ring to past, present, and fu­ture, and to pro­vide it first and fore­most to pre­cise­ly the peo­ple who are like­ly to use "tense" as a catch-all term in their search, rather than to lin­guists who know bet­ter.

Break­ing News There is now an ex­cel­lent ELU blog ar­ti­cle ti­tled How We Talk About Fu­ture Si­t­u­a­tions. It is high­ly rec­om­mend­ed read­ing.

Improve this question
6
  • 5
    Tenses are confusing. Despite what you've heard, English only has two tenses: past and non-past. We have a wealth of periphrastic constructions which allow us to express aspect at all, and more specific tense.
    – user3217
    Commented Apr 24, 2011 at 23:21
  • 11
    @Jonathan: I understand what you are saying, but that is highly dependent on how you define the word "tense". Taking the meaning commonly ascribed to it by the majority of native speakers, it isn't true to say there are only two tenses (though I realise the word has a narrower meaning in linguistics); similarly with "periphrastic" - in the technical sense what you say is true, but not so with the common meaning, since "I will go" is the shortest (standard) way of expressing that meaning :)
    – psmears
    Commented Apr 25, 2011 at 18:30
  • 7
    @Jonathan: (And whatever we call them - tenses, modals, auxiliaries, periphrastic constructions - many people come to this site looking for advice on how to use them :)
    – psmears
    Commented Apr 25, 2011 at 18:31
  • 10
    That's not our problem. If they come looking for eternal salvation, would you have us administer sacraments? Lying to students is the reason why we're in this mess to start with; there's no excuse for continuing the practice.
    – John Lawler
    Commented Apr 12, 2013 at 17:59
  • 5
    @JohnLawler What is it someone's been lying about? And what mess? Really hoping for some elucidation.
    – John M. Landsberg
    Commented Apr 16, 2013 at 9:11

7 Answers 7

Reset to default
232

A visualization of what we mean in English by the various tenses:

A visualization of what we mean in English by the various tenses

Improve this answer
31
  • 13
    Would it be possible to name the tenses? For example, "I had eaten (past perfect/pluperfect)".
    – waiwai933
    Commented Apr 20, 2011 at 4:37
  • 22
    I think this diagram fails to convey anything useful, except maybe for the notion of past and future, which is the last thing people are likely to have trouble with. It also lacks internal consistency: "I am eating" : "I have been eating" = "I was eating" : "I had been eating", yet there is no graphical correspondence.
    – LaC
    Commented Apr 20, 2011 at 13:16
  • 7
    @Robusto, have you considered adding a legend (along left or right edge of diagram) with the names of the tenses the examples embody?
    – James Waldby - jwpat7
    Commented Feb 29, 2012 at 1:18
  • 10
    The point is that there are several thousand such constructions; I didn't even scratch the combinations. They can't all be tenses. In fact, none of them are tenses. That's why we say there are only two tenses in English.
    – John Lawler
    Commented Apr 11, 2013 at 22:30
  • 6
    @Pacerier: If you had been eaten, you wouldn't be around to worry about that.
    – Robusto
    Commented Jun 17, 2015 at 12:30
80

For the sake of presenting the information in another way:

I eat

habitually; in general.

  • “I eat venison occasionally.”

as a command

  • “Now, we eat!”

I am eating

at this point; at this point, continuously; at a point in the future.

  • “I am eating these leftovers. Would you like some?”

  • “I am eating lunch with John on Thursday.”

I ate

at a point in the past.

  • “I ate squid once.”

  • “I ate lunch early today.”

I was eating

at a point in the past, continuously.

  • “I was eating my dinner, when the phone rang.”

I have eaten

at a point in the past; in the past in general.

  • “I have eaten many different kinds of sushi.”

I have been eating

up to and including now, continuously. = I was and am eating.

  • “I have been eating the bread that's on the counter, not knowing it's mouldy.”

I had eaten

before a point in the past.

  • “I had eaten barbecue before, but this steak was better than any I'd ever tasted.”

I had been eating

up to and including a point in the past, continuously.

  • “I had been eating breakfast in bed, till I started seeing ants in my room.”

  • “I had already been eating for fifteen minutes by the time she showed up.”

I will eat

at a point in the future; in the future in general.

  • “I will eat an apple a day from now on.”

  • “I will eat dinner with you tomorrow if you want.”

I will be eating

up to and including a point in the future, continuously.

  • “I will be eating only a little bit of this cake. You can have the rest.”

I will have eaten

before a point in the future.

  • “I will have eaten by the time you get out of work, so we can't eat together.”

I will have been eating

up to and including a point in the future, continuously.

  • “I will have been eating a vegetarian diet for twenty years next month.”
Improve this answer
7
  • 2
    Feel free to flesh out the examples. I preferred a single verb for consistency.
    – Jon Purdy
    Commented Apr 20, 2011 at 20:34
  • 3
    Habituality is by no means the only use of the present indicative in English. For example, if I say "I am hungry" it means I am hungry right now, not as a habit. There are also other mistakes, but I'm posting too much.
    – LaC
    Commented Apr 21, 2011 at 12:26
  • 2
    The present indicative can also be used to describe things as they happen, e.g. a sports commentator: "Montana goes back to pass, and he's sacked at the 42 yard line."
    – Kosmonaut
    Commented Apr 21, 2011 at 12:39
  • 3
    I sit in my chair. I see a computer in front on me. On its screen, a message by @Jon Purdy claims I am being unfair. I disagree.
    – LaC
    Commented Apr 21, 2011 at 16:25
  • 4
    @LaC: Oh no, a slew of other verbs are totally valid examples, and my post is definitely simplified to the point of being incomplete. It's only I am hungry that I had a problem with, since you're using to be to introduce a predicate. Also, there's some colloquial (and facetious) use of do be to denote habitual states: I do be hungry; the Pope does be Catholic. But anyway, the point of making a post CW is that it can be continually improved. If I haven't done a good job, help me.
    – Jon Purdy
    Commented Apr 21, 2011 at 18:14
16

My guess is that you read a table something like this:

  • Present Simple (I eat)
    • habitually; in general.
    • as a command
  • Present Continuous (I am eating
    • at this point
    • at this point, continuously
    • at a point in the future.
  • Past Simple (I ate)
    • at a point in the past.
  • Past Continuous (I was eating)
    • at a point in the past continuously
  • etc...

and found it confusing. Your first instinct (and it's a good one!) was to draw a diagram to make sense of it. But the diagram is just as confusing as the table.

The problem is that our brains just don't work that way. If you ask a typical native speaker to list all the situations where he uses a particular tense, mood & aspect, he'll find it impossible. But if you show him a sentence and ask him to choose the correct tense, mood & aspect, he'll have no trouble. In other words, our mental table of tenses and moods looks more like this:

  • habitually, generally
    • I eat cheese.
  • habitually, in the past
    • I ate cheese.
    • I would eat cheese.
  • making a request
    • Please eat cheese.
    • Could you eat cheese?
    • Would you mind eating cheese?
    • I was wondering whether you would eat some cheese?
  • imaginary situation in the future
    • If I eat cheese, I will have cheese in my belly.
  • imaginary situations in the past
    • I wish I had eaten cheese.
  • etc.

So if you want to make a diagram that is useful to learners of English, you need to take the same approach. That's a tall order! I don't even know that it's possible. I'd love to know about any past attempts.

Improve this answer
2
  • Actually, I just put it together by hand, with input from Kosmonaut and a few others. Of course it will never cover all possible use cases nor be eternally accurate to six decimal places. I intended it as a rough guide for non-native speakers, who may be surprised that, say, you can't indicate precisely that an action is currently being performed without use of the progressive. And so on.
    – Robusto
    Commented Feb 3, 2012 at 16:14
  • 1
    A little late in my response, I know, but actually you can indicate actions taking place now. "I now pronounce you man and wife." "I write to inform you that ...." (arguably) "[I] Thank you." It's called the performative. Admittedly, it's not very common, but I think it reinforces the point I made in my earlier answer.
    – Pitarou
    Commented Mar 19, 2014 at 2:11
12

One strange property of the perfect tense is that it refers to two times: the time in the past when the action was performed, and the time indicated by the auxiliary verb (to have). Depending upon usage, a sentence using the perfect tense can be more about the present (or the time of the auxiliary verb) than it is about the past:

A: Are you hungry?
B: I have eaten.

B implies he is not hungry because he is in the present condition of having eaten recently. This usage provides a way of talking about a current condition because of recent action.

A: Do you have homework?
B: I have graduated!

B implies he is now in the condition of never having homework because he graduated from school. The emphasis is on the present.

A: What did you do when you ran out of gas?
B: I had been a Boy Scout in my youth, so I was prepared and 
   had a small tank of gas in my trunk.

Although B might be foolish for keeping containers of flammable liquids in the tight confines of his trunk, his Boy Scout readiness existed at the time he ran out of gas.

Humans exist in a flux of ever-changing conditions often resulting from recent actions, and the perfect tense gives us an easy way to talk about them.

Improve this answer
3
  • 2
    +1 and welcome to the site. This is a good answer, enough so that it probably deserves its own venue. I think you should maybe ask a separate question about perfect tenses, to which you would supply this answer. Yeah, you can do that.
    – Robusto
    Commented Jul 28, 2015 at 11:07
  • 2
    Robusto, thanks. This is a much friendlier welcome than I had on the grammar board, where I was more accosted than greeted. Thanks.
    – Feralthinker
    Commented Jul 28, 2015 at 11:59
  • 2
    What grammar board would that be? Not on the StackExchange network, surely.
    – Robusto
    Commented Jul 28, 2015 at 12:11
9

Your past perfect tense starts in the infinite past for any action, but it doesn't have to happen so. I include an illustration for the verb see in the past perfect from the following text, written around 2010, which is about a movie that was shelved in 1981, kept for two decades, but finally released around 2002. So, instead of two reference points on the timeline, there can be three.

  • The story behind Ladies and Gentleman, The Fabulous Stains is a messy and complicated one. It was riddled with production problems, an editing process that took over a year to complete, and after all was said and done, Paramount Studios decided to shelf the film for over 20 years. … Adler also took over a year to edit the film after shooting wrapped up, allegedly changing the ending several times. Once Ladies and Gentleman, The Fabulous Stains was completed, it was previewed at a few test screenings and the response was so poor that Paramount decided not to release it at all. Many of the cast and crew hadn’t even seen the film in its entirety after it was completed.

------------------------1981=========2002------NOW------------------------

Extra reference points can be included for some other tenses, but I leave that to the readers.

Improve this answer
8

Don't forget subjunctive/conditional:

Ernie would eat that cookie if Bert were not watching him.

Ernie would eat that cookie if Bert was not watching him.

The first is subjunctive: it implies Bert is watching Ernie, but if that weren't true, then Ernie would eat the cookie. Subjunctive tense is used when stating a condition that isn't true, but we are imagining an alternate reality.

The second is conditional (not sure if that's the right name): whether Bert was or wasn't watching Ernie is unknown.

The normal subject-verb agreement ("Bert was") gets tweaked to form subjunctive ("was" → "were").

Improve this answer
12
  • 12
    Those are moods, not tenses.
    – LaC
    Commented Apr 20, 2011 at 13:25
  • 4
    @LaC: Couldn't "I will eat!" be considered a mood and not a tense?
    – Dan
    Commented Apr 20, 2011 at 20:52
  • 4
    There's no difference in the way English grammar treats will/would/shall/should/can/could/may/might/must. However, when teaching English, it's awkward to say that these are all tenses, and it's awkward not to have a future tense. Thus, constructions with "will" are called tenses, and constructions with "would" are sometimes called tenses, and constructions with the other auxiliary verbs above are generally called moods.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Apr 21, 2011 at 0:43
  • 7
    Now, to answer the question, "tense" refers to the time of the action (in fact, the word "tense" is just a fancy-pants way of saying "time"), while "mood" refers to one of several modes of use (to indicate fact, hypothesis, command, etc.). The two concepts are orthogonal: for instance, "I was" is past tense, indicative mood; "[if] I were [king]" is present tense, subjunctive mood; "[if] I had been [awake]" is past tense, subjunctive mood"; "I see [a cow in the field]" is present tense, indicative mood.
    – LaC
    Commented Apr 21, 2011 at 12:19
  • 4
    @LaC No, ‘If I were’ is not ‘present’ subjunctive! That’s ‘If I be’, and is not now used; see ‘lest I be’ for a contemporary example of the pr subj. ‘If I were’ is where a Romance speaker would use imperfect subjunctive, as in ‘Si (yo) estuviese listo, me iría’ (If I were ready, I’d leave) in Spanish; notice ‘iría’ is in the conditional. What you mislabel past subjunctive is a compound tense, aligning then with ‘Si hubiese estado listo’ which is the pluperfect subjunctive in Spanish, because ‘had been’ has ‘had’ in the imperfect subjunctive and ‘been’ in the participle.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Feb 3, 2012 at 12:45
2

Regarding present/past perfect continuous, e.g.:
I have been reading and I have read
can both even be used in the same situation by the same person; the difference isn't always temporal:
I have been reading since 3:00.
I have read 50 pages.

The first emphasizes the action, and the second emphasizes the object, even if it is the same person saying both sentences one right after the other.
I also note that this diagram shows exactly the same for "I had eaten," and "I had been eating," but not for the "I have..." versions, presumably because you didn't want to add too many points in the past. But that surely won't help anyone differentiate between them.

I also use timelines to illustrate some of these, but not 12 of them at once. From a practical ESL point of view (incidentally), it's more helpful for most non-native speakers to get very comfortable with maybe 5 of these first, and the others will then start to make sense when they come up. Of course, that's not what they want to hear!

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .