Verb Tense Overview

Definition

English verbs can be changed (inflected) to express different types of information:

Time (past / present / future*)

Aspect (whether the action or state is complete, ongoing, or prior)

Person and number (first, second, third person; singular or plural)

Voice (active or passive)

* Linguists argue about the future tense, but we’ll keep it here for now.

The verb tense system really combines time + aspect. If you’ve studied other languages, especially Romance languages (e.g., French, Spanish, Italian) or Germanic languages (e.g., German, Dutch), you may see that the tenses look familiar but have different names, forms, and uses. Verbs in some other languages do not inflect to show verb tense at all (e.g., Chinese).

This chapter presents an overview of the entire verb tense system in English. It’s quite complicated, so other chapters in Part 2 explore the most common tenses in more depth.

Form

The English verb system is shown below with the traditional names commonly used in ESL/EFL structural grammar. For example, these are the forms of the regular verb work.

We read the tenses as time+aspect (e.g. present simple, past perfect, present progressive).

Of course, English has quite a number of irregular verbs. There aren’t actually very many compared to regular verbs, but the irregular verbs tend to be highly frequent. The forms of these verbs have to be learned: they cannot easily be predicted. For example, for the irregular verb eat, the irregular forms are highlighted:

Note that the verb be is extra irregular:

Although all verb tenses occur in English and carry different meanings, which will be discussed below and at enormous length in most grammar textbooks, in reality, three verb tenses account for well over 95% of tenses verbs in most types of writing: present simple, past simple, present perfect. If you add the present progressive, which is quite frequent in speech, and different ways to express the future, that’s enough for most learners to be taught explicitly. The others will emerge eventually in context. Each of these tenses is described in a separate chapter in Part 2.

Verb forms

We use the following terms to describe the forms of the verb in ESL/EFL grammar. More information can be found in Part 4: Morphology.

In compound tenses (that is, tenses that require more than one verb), we distinguish between the main verb (the verb that carries the meaning) and the auxiliary (or, helping) verbs (which mark the time and aspect). Every verb phrase must have a main verb. For example:

Therefore, we can summarize the formation of tenses like this:

The verbs do, have, be, and get can be auxiliary verbs, main verbs, or both, which can be confusing:

If in doubt, these guidelines should help:

• If there’s one verb in the verb phrase, it’s the main verb.
• If there’s more than one verb in the verb phrase, the last one is the main verb, and all the others are auxiliaries.
• We only mark tense on the first verb in the verb phrase, which may be the main verb (I went to the doctor vs. I go to the doctor) or the first auxiliary (I was going to the doctor vs. I am going to the doctor). The verbs in bold are known as finite verbs.

Further reading

Modal verbs are also considered auxiliary verbs but are not usually considered to have tense.

Every tense also has a negative form.