Running past tents

It's been a while since we discussed any good groanworthy puns in a Grammar Talk post; did you hear the one about why you can't run in a campground? As you can probably guess from this week's title, it's because you're going past tents (tense), so you can only "ran". Yeah, that got a noise out of you, I'm sure. Probably a dismayed one. It's alright, though, because I'll give you a good break before the next pun, I promise.

Anyway, we're talking about tenses today, so buckle up!

Simple tenses

The basic tenses that we are all familiar with already are the past, present, and future tenses. In their simplest forms, these tenses tell us in the most straightforward manner that an event either:

• has occurred in the past,
• is currently occurring in the present, or
• will occur in the future.

The sentence structure associated with these tense forms reflects this simplicity—here are some examples of simple past, simple present, and simple future tenses:

I picked a bushel of apples.

I pick a bushel of apples.

I will pick a bushel of apples.

You can see that the verb phrases are quite pared down in these examples; in the past and present tenses, we represent the action in a single word, with only the auxiliary verb of "will" added to the future tense. A simple tense doesn't give a whole lot of additional information about the timing of an event, just whether it already happened, is happening now, or is expected to happen later.

As a side note, simple present tense is also used to describe an inherent state of being, such as "the world is round" or "giraffes are very spotty". (Note that the verb in these statements must be an "is" or an "are".)

Continuous tenses

If you want to indicate that an event took, takes, or will take place over a period of time, you use a continuous tense. Compare the following examples to the ones in the previous section:

I was picking a bushel of apples.

I am picking a bushel of apples.

I will be picking a bushel of apples.

These sentences make the apple-picking process seem a bit more time-consuming, don't they? Note that the verbs all use the "-ing" form, with the time of the event being communicated using the appropriate versions of the "to be" auxiliary verb.

So far, so straightforward. It's time to get your thinking caps in order now, though...

Perfect tenses

Perfect tenses are where we start to get more complicated; they connect the primary event to another event happening at a different time. To illustrate this, let's add a secondary event to our examples:

I had picked a bushel of apples when a storm blew in.

I have picked a bushel of apples while a storm blows in.

I will have picked a bushel of apples before the storm blows in.

Our primary action is appended with a variant of the auxiliary verb "to have", and the main verb itself ("picked") uses a past tense, regardless of the tense of the overall phrase, as this is determined by the auxiliary verb. The secondary action, meanwhile, uses a more basic simple tense.

In the first sentence, both the picking of apples and the arrival of the storm happened in the past, but it's clear from the syntax and that the storm didn't begin until after a bushel of apples had been gathered. The future-tense example is almost the same, except that both of the events are yet to happen.

Present perfect tense is a little different, though, because we use present tense for a lot of stuff. With its current wording, our second example is a little closer to the way simple present tense states a fact—although the words themselves describe two events that occurred concurrently in the past, we aren't focusing so much on the specific events as we are on the fact that they existed. Alternatively, we could give the example as I have picked a bushel of apples before, which has the same tense, but instead of providing a secondary event explicitly the action of apple-picking is tied to the present.

Perfect continuous tenses

As you may be able to intuit, perfect continuous tense combines the key elements of perfect and continuous tenses to describe an event which takes place over a period of time and also in relation to another event. We can combine these tenses to change our examples like so:

I had been picking a bushel of apples when a storm blew in.

I have been picking a bushel of apples while a storm blows in.

I will have been picking a bushel of apples when the storm blows in.

In terms of meaning, these examples are fairly similar to what they were for the perfect tenses, but with more focus on the apple-picking as a process that takes time. Syntactically speaking, we're combining the "to be" auxiliary verb (which is "been" in all three of our examples) and the "-ing" form of our verb—both of which we got from the continuous tense—with the "to have" auxiliary verb of the perfect tense.

So there we have a very basic crash course on tenses. Do you feel like you've learned something? Because I have definitely learned a few things in putting this post together for you.

Best of luck navigating tenses from here, and happy writing!