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3. Tense and Finiteness
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
- Chapter
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Verb Forms If you look at a typical piece of writing by an average student, you are bound to notice a lot of errors which have to do with the forms of verbs. Why is it so difficult to learn to use verbs correctly in English? Let’s start by looking at Chinese. Take any verb — say, the verb chi ( ‘eat’). QUESTION 1 How many different forms does the Chinese verb chi () have? Answer: In Chinese, a verb has only one form. Chi is always chi — no matter who, no matter when, no matter how. Now take the English verb eat. 3 Tense and Finiteness 42 Understanding English Grammar QUESTION 2 Can you list all the different forms of the verb eat? Answer: You should have at least five: eat, eats, eating, ate, eaten. You might have an additional form, the infinitive to eat (we’ll explain in the Notes and Answer Key section why this may be necessary). Just to make it easier for us to refer to them from now on, let’s give each of them a label. We’ll use the verbs eat and talk for illustration: Verb Form Label (i) eat, talk present tense (general) (ii) eats, talks present tense (3rd person singular) (iii) ate, talked past tense (iv) eating, talking present participle (v) eaten, talked past participle (vi) (to) eat, (to) talk infinitive QUESTION 3 Give the six forms of the following verbs: wash break run hear Present tense (general) Present tense (3rd per. sing.) Past tense Present participle Past participle Infinitive [3.236.111.234] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:22 GMT) Tense and Finiteness 43 Most verbs in English are like talk and wash, in having ‘regular’past tense and past participle forms, which are formed by attaching the suffix — ed to the verb, as in talk, talked (past tense), talked (past participle). 1. They talk too much. 2. They talked too much yesterday. 3. They have talked too much already. [NB: For an explanation why we treat talked in (3) as past participle rather than past tense, see the Notes section for this unit.] In contrast, a certain number of verbs — especially among the more ‘basic’ verbs like eat, see, run, etc. — are ‘irregular’, because they form the past tense and past participle in other ways than by adding -ed, as in eat, ate, eaten; see, saw, seen; run, ran, run, etc. 4. They eat too much. 5. They ate too much yesterday. 6. They have eaten too much already. For such verbs, you’ll just have to memorize their irregular forms. Tense Merely knowing the forms of verbs is a relatively trivial matter — if in doubt, just look it up in a dictionary. What is less easy and much more important is to learn to use these different forms of verbs properly in their various functions. One of the most important functions of verb forms is to show tense. Tense is one of the most noticeable differences between English and Chinese grammar. As you know, Chinese has no tense. For example, the verb ‘’ (live) in sentence 7 is neither in the present nor the past tense: 7. !" (‘he live in Taipo’) This does not, of course, mean that Chinese has no way of indicating time. In Chinese, you can indicate the time frame by using such phrases as ‘now’ (), ‘before’ (), ‘after’(), ‘already’(), ‘yesterday’(), etc. and other devices like aspect, which we’ll not go into here, as in: 8. ‘He now live in Taipo’ ( !) 9. ‘He before live in Taipo’ ( !) The big difference between English and Chinese is this: • In English, a time frame — ‘past’ or ‘present’ — is built into the grammar of verbs, rather than just added on as extra words. English grammar forces us to commit the main verb of a sentence to either the present or past tense. The English equivalents of sentences 8–9 are thus: 44 Understanding English Grammar 10. He lives in Taipo. 11. He lived in Taipo. (If we like, we can add ‘now’ or ‘in the past’ to these sentences for extra emphasis, but they are not necessary in English, as they are in Chinese, to distinguish present and past.) Which of the six forms of a verb are used to indicate tense? Three of them, namely: Present tense (general) : eat, talk Present tense (3rd per. sing.) : eats, talks Past tense : ate, talked The above three forms are thus called tensed or ‘finite’ forms. ‘Finite’ suggests ‘limited’. Take any verb from...