Question:
There's been a little debate fired in another website with an innocent
question of how many tenses are used in common English in Ireland. Some
people said you'd only need two to get by, others categorically claim you'll
use all of the tenses and then some more! :)
It might be somewhat difficult to establish what "common English" is. I
would agree ALL tenses can be used in speech to express certain... opinions.
IF however the question was meant to be: "how many tenses are COMMONLY used
in English" I'd personally say, up to 7 -10 perhaps, _depending on social
and educational background_. Is it a fair or ridiculous estimate? And is
grammatical "sophistication" irrelevant of social and educational
environment ?
Answer:
No problem. It's either "standard English" or it's "the English that
most people speak and understand" or it's "the English of the common
people". It doesn't matter.
There are only two tenses in English: past and present. The verb
forms and auxiliaries associated with these two tenses are aspects;
eg,
simple present: I run.
simple past : I ran.
progressive aspect: am/was running
perfect aspect : have/had run
prefect & progressive aspects combined: have/had been running
There is no future tense in English. Futurity is expressed by the
simple present, as in "I run tonight at 9:00 p.m.", a modal plus the
"bare" infinitive, "I shall/will run tonight at 9:00 p.m.", or the
progressive aspect with "go" or a modal, as in "I am going to run
tonight" or "I will be running tonight". There are other
possibilities.
Most grammar books will identify more than two tenses because they
count the adornments of aspect as separate tenses, but it just isn't
so. There is a terminological problem here. Look at a French grammar
and you will see four indicative tenses: present, imperfect, past,
and future, each with its own verb ending. Look at English, and you
will see that each verb has only two indicative forms: present and
past.
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