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7.21: Text- Verb Tenses

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    What is tense? There are three standard tenses in English: past, present and future. All three of these tenses have simple and more complex forms. For now we’ll just focus on the simple present (things happening now), the simple past (things that happened before), and the simple future (things that will happen later).

    Tenses

    Present Tense

    Watch this quick introduction to the present tense:

    Thumbnail for the embedded element "The present tense | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy"

    A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: http://pb.libretexts.org/braw/?p=478

    Past Tense

    Watch this quick introduction to the past tense:

    Thumbnail for the embedded element "The past tense | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy"

    A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: http://pb.libretexts.org/braw/?p=478

    Future Tense

    Watch this quick introduction to the future tense:

    Thumbnail for the embedded element "The future tense | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy"

    A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: http://pb.libretexts.org/braw/?p=478

    Other Forms of the Past, Present, and Future

    You may have noticed that in the present tense video David talked about “things that are happening right now” and that he mentioned there were other ways to create the past and future tense. We won’t discuss these tenses in too much depth, but it’s important to recognize them.

    We already discussed these briefly in Text: Helping Verbs. These forms are created with different forms of to be and to have:

    • He had eaten everything by the time we got there.
    • She is waiting for us to get there!
    • He will have broken it by next Thursday, you can be sure.
    • She was singing for eight hours.

    When you combine to be with the –ing form of a verb you create a sense of continuity. The subject of the sentence was (or is, or will be) doing that thing for awhile. When you combine to have with the past participle of a verb, you create a sense of completion. This thing had been done for a while (or has been, or will have been). The sense of past, present, or future comes from the conjugation of to be or to have. For further discussion on this topic, look at the “Participles” section in Text: Non-Finite Verbs.

    Conjugation

    Most verbs will follow the pattern that we just learned in the previous videos:

    Person Past Present Future
    I verb + ed verb will verb
    We verb + ed verb will verb
    You verb + ed verb will verb
    He, She, It verb + ed verb + s (or es) will verb
    They verb + ed verb will verb

    To Walk

    Let’s look at the verb to walk for an example:

    Person Past Present Future
    I walked walk will walk
    We walked walk will walk
    You walked walk will walk
    He, She, It walked walks will walk
    They walked walk will walk

    Practice

    Change the tense of each sentence as directed below. You can type your answers in the text field below:

    1. Make this sentence present tense: Alejandra directed a play.
    2. Make this sentence past tense: Lena will show me how to use a microscope.
    3. Make this sentence future tense: Gabrielly eats a lot of hamburgers.

    [practice-area rows=”4″][/practice-area]
    [reveal-answer q=”474777″]Click to Show Answer[/reveal-answer]
    [hidden-answer a=”474777″]

    1. Alejandra directs a play.
    2. Lena showed me how to use a microscope.
    3. Gabrielly will eat a lot of hamburgers.

    [/hidden-answer]

    Irregular Verbs

    There are a lot of irregular verbs. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of memorization involved in keeping them straight. This video shows a few of the irregular verbs you’ll have to use the most often (to be, to have, to do, and to say):

    Thumbnail for the embedded element "Introduction to irregular verbs | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy"

    A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: http://pb.libretexts.org/braw/?p=478

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    7.21: Text- Verb Tenses is shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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