Timeline for answer to How do the tenses and aspects in English correspond temporally to one another? by sibbaldiopsis
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| Jun 15, 2020 at 7:40 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| Mar 27, 2017 at 21:42 | history | edited | Peter Mortensen | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jul 28, 2015 at 11:54 | comment | added | Feralthinker | Yes, you can think of a conjugation as a cell in a 5-dimensional matrix, the axes of which comprise person (1st, 2nd, 3rd), number (singular or plural), mood (indicative or subjunctive), voice (active or passive), and tense. | |
| Feb 3, 2012 at 13:11 | comment | added | LaC | @tchrist: you're right, "if I were" is imperfect (but probably just called "past" in English) and "if I had been" is pluperfect. | |
| Feb 3, 2012 at 12:45 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | @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. | |
| Apr 21, 2011 at 23:05 | comment | added | sibbaldiopsis | @LaC: I meant the latter half of each sentence, not the former. As for indicative/conditional... I can only blame my memory or my English teacher in 1989. Am I free to eat my hat now? | |
| Apr 21, 2011 at 18:54 | comment | added | Dan | @Peter Shor: But there is a difference. 'will' is often defined for students as the future tense. I'm not suggesting that moods be called tenses, but they are qualifiers of those "tenses". How is 'will' any less a mood than 'might' in "I will go" v "I might go". 'will' does not guarantee going, it only expresses a personal feeling that the likelihood of going is 100%. Where is the cutoff point? Is "I almost certainly will go" close enough in epistemic meaning to qualify as a "tense"? | |
| Apr 21, 2011 at 12:23 | comment | added | LaC | BTW, I had originally only read the first line of this answer. Now that I look at the rest, I must say it's completely wrong. In "Ernie would eat that cookie if Bert were not watching him", "would eat" is in conditional mood, "were not watching" is in subjunctive mood. In "Ernie would eat that cookie if Bert was not watching him", the subjunctive is replaced with the indicative, not to indicate any change in meaning, but simply because the subjunctive is usually identical to the indicative in English, and what few differences remain (eg "were") are being lost. | |
| Apr 21, 2011 at 12:19 | comment | added | LaC | 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. | |
| Apr 21, 2011 at 12:18 | comment | added | LaC | I'm told that grammar is usually not taught in school in several English-speaking countries. That doesn't mean that grammar does not exist, or that it stops at syntax ("ok, it's all auxiliary verbs, let's go home"), or that it was constructed merely for the benefit of foreign learners. Tense, mood, aspect etc. are useful concepts in linguistics that apply across languages. | |
| Apr 21, 2011 at 0:43 | comment | added | Peter Shor | 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. | |
| Apr 20, 2011 at 22:08 | comment | added | sibbaldiopsis | @LaC: go figure, I could have sworn they were tenses. Either we were taught wrong or the name has changed or I'm just forgetting things ;-) | |
| Apr 20, 2011 at 20:52 | comment | added | Dan | @LaC: Couldn't "I will eat!" be considered a mood and not a tense? | |
| Apr 20, 2011 at 13:25 | comment | added | LaC | Those are moods, not tenses. | |
| Apr 20, 2011 at 2:48 | history | answered | sibbaldiopsis | CC BY-SA 3.0 |