Matt Garley and Karl Hagen

Portions adapted from Hagen, Karl. Navigating English Grammar. 2020. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Tense, Main Verbs, and Auxiliary Verbs

Before we go into the structure of the verb phrase, or the clause, for that matter, we can start by establishing how important the verb is to the sentence (or main clause). Whether or not it contributes much meaning to the sentence, the main verb is really the key component, the foundation on which the entire sentence rests. Because the appearance of the main verb alongside auxiliary verbs is the basis of the verb phrase (which functions as the predicate) and the predicate is the basis of the clause, it’s important for us to be able to identify main and auxiliary verbs early on in our analysis of English sentences.

In a sentence like (1), there are two verbs, has and eaten, in the same phrase:

(1) Jonathan has eaten my sandwich

The verb has in this sentence is a member of a subset of verbs called auxiliary verbs.^[1] The purpose of this chapter is to 1) examine the different forms main and auxiliary verbs appear in, i.e. the verb paradigm, explore the auxiliary constructions main and auxiliary verbs appear in, and particularly how these relate to the concept of tense, and how tense and time are distinct concepts.

Tense

At some point in your schooling, you were almost certainly introduced to verb tenses. We’ll develop a precise understanding of tense in a moment, but for now, think back to what you were taught. What is tense? How many different tenses can you remember learning for English? Take a moment to jot down what you can remember before continuing.

I have asked these questions of many students over the years. By far the most common answers are that tense has something to do with the time of the sentence and that there are three tenses: past, present, and future. Some people, perhaps remembering their foreign-language classes, will list more tenses, with names like pluperfect and so on. Some grammar books have long lists of inflections of verbs with names like the past perfect tense (for example, “had played”), or the future progressive tense (for example, “will be playing”).

If you never could keep all these straight, you are not alone. One reason you may have problems is that the story that most schoolbook grammars tell about tense is not particularly accurate. These books are frequently vague about just what tense is, and they implicitly lump together separate elements of the verb phrase into this single category. One consequence of this muddled pedagogy is that students come away with the sense that anything having to do with the verb should be called a tense. It is easy, for example, to find instances of journalists or other educated people talking about the “passive tense” (it’s actually a voice, as we will see in a later chapter).^[2]

Before I reveal how we will actually treat tense, I would like to step you through a short exercise that will show some of the problems with the traditional conception of tense. To begin, fill in the sentence “Marissa ________ her dog” with the form of the verb walk that is appropriate for each of the three primary tenses that you were taught: past, present, and future. Write these down so you will have something to refer to as you look at the next set of examples.

Form used in the present tense: ________________
Form used in the past tense: ________________
Form used in the future tense: ________________

Pay attention in particular to what distinguishes one form of the verb from another. (Note that the form of the present-tense verb that you wrote could have been different if we had used a different subject, for example, they. This difference is separate from tense, and so to keep things simple, all of the examples that follow will use will employ similar subjects so that we only need to consider one form for each tense.)

Now consider the following sentences. For each one, look at the underlined verb. What tense does each one have? Don’t be distracted by the meaning of the sentence. Just look at the form to answer this.

(2) My flight leaves at 10 pm.
(3) Marissa walks her dog each evening.
(4) Your mother tells me you plan to go to law school.
(5) Sherry will be sorry that she missed seeing you this evening.
(6) If he studied, he could pass the upcoming test.

Now look at the time of the action to which each verb refers. Do you see the problem?

In sentence (2), you may have been tempted to declare leaves a future-tense verb, but compare the form to our previous list. It is actually a present-tense form, although the sentence refers to a future event. In sentence (3), walks is a present-tense verb, but notice that the time it describes is not really now. This statement can be true even if the dog-walking is not occurring at the moment of the statement, for example if it’s morning. Sentence (4) also contains a present-tense verb, tells, but the act of telling clearly took place before the statement, and so refers to past-time. In sentence (5), missed seems to be in the past tense, but notice that this event (the missing) is ongoing during the time that the sentence is being uttered. From the frame of the speaker, it occurs in the present time. In sentence (6), the proposed action (studying), along with the test, lies in the future, but studied is a past-tense form.

What is going on here?

These examples illustrate that tense does not always equate simply with time. When we use the term tense, we are referring to a grammatical form. Time, however, is a semantic concept that can be expressed in ways other than a grammatical marking of the verb. In sentence (2), for example, the futurity of the action is conveyed not by the verb but by the prepositional phrase at 10 pm. Further, tense can be used, in extended senses, to convey meanings other than time. In sentence (6), the past tense marks not past time but the speaker’s opinion that the subject is unlikely to actually study and that the situation is therefore a hypothetical one.

Once we appreciate this crucial distinction between form and meaning, we are ready to look at exactly what tense is. As we will define it, tense refers to a grammatical form, or system of forms, whose primary function is to refer to a point in time.

This definition of tense is narrower than the one typically given in schoolbooks. Note in particular that while pointing to a time is the primary function of tense, it is not the only function. Further, this function doesn’t involve every possible aspect of time, only reference to basic points in time. As we will discover shortly, there are other features of a temporal situation that are conveyed with different means.

How many tenses does English have? By now, I hope I have convinced you to mistrust the simple explanations of the schoolbooks. Let’s return to the examples of the basic tenses that we produced before:

Tense according to the schoolbooks:

Tense	Example
Present	walks
Past	walked
Future	will walk

Looking at these forms, the future seems very different. While the present and the past are formed synthetically, that is by means of an inflection, the future is formed analytically, that is by means of an auxiliary verb. By itself, that difference may not be decisive—the comparative degree of adjectives, for example, can be expressed either synthetically (quieter) or analytically (more pleasant)—but enough differences distinguish the traditional future tense from the present and past tense forms that it does not make much sense to lump them together.

First, in terms of grammatical structure, will is not unique. It operates like many other auxiliary verbs, verbs which are sometimes called conditionals, but which we will call modal verbs. Examples of other modal verbs are can, may, should, or must. These verbs will be the subject of the next section, but for now notice that each of these combines with another verb in exactly the same way: the auxiliary is followed by the bare form of the verb:

(7a) Marissa will walk her dog.
(7b) Marissa can walk her dog.
(7c) Marissa may walk her dog.
(7d) Marissa should walk her dog.
(7e) Marissa must walk her dog.

In terms of the semantics, there are various shades of meaning conveyed by the different modal verbs. Sentences 7a-e differ in the degrees of possibility or obligation that they express, but all of these sentences refer in some way to an event that has not yet occurred. In other words, the situation is located in the future. Thus will is not unique in picking out a future time. Moreover, there are some contexts in which will is not the normal way we refer to a future action. For example, suppose you have plans to go to a party tomorrow, and a friend asks you to see a movie with her. Which response would be normal to decline that invitation?

(8a) Sorry, I will go to the party.
(8b) Sorry, I’m going to the party.

Sentence (8b), of course, would be the normal response. English speakers regularly use the second form to refer to future action when there is a definite plan. Indeed, if we think about the contexts in which (8a) might be acceptable, we can see that (8a) expresses more than just the future time of an event. It also conveys the speaker’s firm determination. You might say it, for example, in response to someone who has told you that you should stay home and study. (“Sorry, I WILL go to the party.”) This additional element, telling us something about the speaker’s attitude in addition to the time, is frequently conveyed by other modal auxiliaries.

(9) She must have been drunk.

As in (8a), sentence (9) expresses a conclusion about the speaker’s attitude or understanding of a situation. As we will see shortly, expressing this sort of meaning is one of the common functions of modal auxiliaries.

Finally, and perhaps most strikingly, in sentences with multiple verbs, will appears in contexts with present-tense verbs. Conversely, the closely related would appears in contexts with past-tense verbs.

(10a) Scientists predict that the volcano, which has been inactive for many years, will erupt at any moment.
(10b) Scientists predicted that the volcano, which had been inactive for many years, would erupt at any moment.

Notice that the highlighted verbs in (10a) are present tense, and the highlighted verbs in (10b) are past tense. Moreover, we cannot substitute would for will or vice versa.

(10c) *Scientists predict that the volcano, which has been inactive for many years, would erupt at any moment.
(10d) *Scientists predicted that the volcano, which had been inactive for many years, will erupt at any moment.

Sentences (10a) and (10b) illustrate the tendency of tense consistency. In other words, unless there is some overriding reason to switch tenses, the basic tense of a sentence will remain consistent throughout. In short, will is consistent with present-tense verbs and inconsistent with past-tense verbs.

Taken together, all these observations lead to a surprising conclusion: English does not have a future tense. English tenses are expressed by inflections on the verb. That means that English has only two tenses: present and past. Will is an auxiliary and part of a different verbal system, that of mood. Will does have a tense, but as examples 10a-d show, it is a present-tense verb.

This conclusion differs dramatically from what is typically taught in schoolbook grammars, but it is not new-fangled linguistics. The two-tense nature of English, and of other Germanic languages,^[3] was first recognized in the early nineteenth century, and is currently the standard account in the reference works used by professional linguists. That so many books used in primary and secondary education still cling to an outdated description is scandalous but unfortunately typical of the disconnect between the authors of such books and linguistic scholarship.

What do you mean there’s no future tense?

Some people have trouble accepting that English lacks a future tense. If you are in that group, there are several points to keep in mind. First, remember that tense is not the same as time. To say that English lacks a future tense does not mean that it has no way of referring to the future. It has many ways to do that. In English, the future is a time-reference, but not a tense. Second, English may lack a future tense, but other languages do have one, particularly languages you are likely to have studied in school, such as Spanish, French, or Latin. Indeed, the tense system of Latin is partly at fault for the way that tense is taught today. When the early grammarians sat down to write the first grammars of English, they took Latin as the model, and simply filled in the categories that worked for Latin with their nearest English equivalents. It should not be surprising that different languages should vary in how many tenses they have. After all, one of the reason that languages are different is because they follow different sets of rules. There is nothing logically necessary about dividing time up into past, present, and future, and even given a three-fold distinction, there is no logical requirement that each distinction must be expressed through tense.

The Verb Paradigm

Main and Aux verbs (except modals) come in different forms depending on how they’re used. They can be regular (where each form has the expected/usual ending) or irregular. We’ll treat verbs as having primary or tensed forms, and secondary or tenseless forms.

Here, I’ve selected the three main verbs that also function as Aux, since they’re very common irregular verbs.

You might notice that BE has eight different forms; it’s the most common verb in English and the only one that has more than six, so we’re not going to make up extra forms for it (you could technically say it has a 1s present (am), a plain present (are), a 3s present (is), a singular preterite (was), and a plural preterite (were). It’s easier to remember that it has a bit more person and number agreement than other verbs. ‘Be’ acts special in other ways too—in terms of yes/no questions and other instances of Subject/Aux inversion, it moves like an auxiliary verb, even if it’s a main verb. (Ex. “Was I fishing?” vs. “*Did I be fishing?”; compare “*Had I a car?” vs. “Did I have a car?”)

Auxiliary Verbs & Auxiliary Constructions

In a simple auxiliary construction, an Aux is paired with a main verb (or another Aux) in a certain form. The Aux carries the grammatical tense for the clause, while the second verb occurs in a secondary form. In complex auxiliary constructions with more than one auxiliary, the first Aux is a tensed primary form.

1) Mood and modal auxiliaries

In the previous section, I briefly introduced you to the modal auxiliaries when I argued that will does not constitute a separate tense marker. To understand the function of modal auxiliaries, you need to know two related terms: modality and mood.

Modality refers to a set of related concepts primarily involving the attitude of the speaker of a sentence towards the reality of a particular assertion. What exactly that means is complicated and best illustrated with an example:

(11) Tad programs computers for a living.
(12) Tad must program computers for a living.

In sentence (11), the speaker asserts the truth of a proposition. In (12), by contrast, the speaker qualifies the proposition. The situation is presented not as one the speaker knows directly but as one the speaker has inferred. In other words, in (12), must indicates something about the speaker’s mental state. These sentences, therefore, contrast in their modality.

Mood refers to a grammatical system that is primarily used to convey modality. The difference between mood and modality is parallel to the difference between tense and time. Like time, modality is a semantic concept; like tense, mood is a grammatical realization of a concept. For the most part, English expresses mood analytically, through a system of modal auxiliaries.^[4] As with tense, mood does not always correspond in a simple fashion with modality. One modal verb can express several different modalities, depending on the context. And just as time can be expressed in different parts of a sentence, for example by prepositional phrases, modality can be indicated with things other than auxiliary verbs:

(13) I heard his supposed apology.

In sentence (13) the adjective supposed expresses the speaker’s conclusion that the apology is not a valid one, for example because it lacks sincerity. Words such as supposed, then, express modality, but not mood.

Sentence (12a) represents the default situation, one without a modal verb, in which the speaker simply indicates that something is true. This unmarked situation is called the indicative mood, although since this is the ordinary case, we usually don’t mention it unless we’re contrasting it with another mood.

In some grammar books, the presence of a modal auxiliary is said to mark the conditional mood. This label reflects the fact that modal auxiliaries commonly appear in sentences that express a condition:

(14) If you build it, they will come.

However, the label conditional is not ideal. There are many other situations in which modal auxiliaries appear other than the conditional structure. Further, many conditional sentences do not use modal auxiliaries:

(15) If he got a ticket to the concert, he was lucky.

Because modal auxiliaries express a variety of different modalities, we will not try to lump them all into a single mood. Instead, we will simply call such verb phrases modal, and if we need to distinguish among them, we will do so by their meaning.

Characteristics of modal auxiliaries

There are a small number of modal auxiliaries, and they display distinct features that set them apart from other auxiliary verbs.

The Principal Modal Auxiliaries:

Present Tense	(former) Past Tense
can	could
may	might
must	—
ought	—
shall	should
will	would

This set of verbs differs from other auxiliaries in the following ways:

• They do not agree in the third-person singular, as do other auxiliaries and lexical verbs. (16) *She cans play the piano beautifully.
• They are followed by a bare infinitive form of another verb. Most other verbs use the infinitive with to. Ought is an exception to this rule. It does require a to-infinitive but otherwise behaves like other modal verbs. (17a) *They must to work on the project.
  (17b) They want to work on the project.
  (17c) They ought to work on the project.
• They have no non-finite forms (present participle, past participle or infinitive). As a consequence, they cannot appear in places in the verb phrase where one of these forms would be required: (18) *Robertson was shoulding here tonight.
  (19) *The Senate has mayed ignore its own rules.
  (20) *I would like to will take you out to dinner.

A different way putting this last point would be to say that all the modal verbs have an inherent tense, as indicated in the table above. That table is organized in two columns to show you the relationship between present and past tense forms. In other words, would is the past-tense of will, could the past tense of can, etc. This used to be more true than it is–another way to think of this is that these used to be present and past tense forms, but have since scattered into a number of distinct present tense forms.

2) Progressive constructions

Consider the difference between the following sentences:

(33a) Cerise worked efficiently

(33b) Cerise was working efficiently

Sentence 33a, which uses the simple past tense, refers in general to a completed action. Sentence 33b refers to the action as being in progress at some particular time. The construction illustrated in 33b is known as the progressive. It is formed with a form of the verb BE and a form of verb ending in -ing. Although some schoolbook grammars call this construction a tense, that label is not accurate. Notice that 33a and 33b do not make a distinction in the time of the event. They could well describe the same action. The sentences differ in how they view the action’s internal structure, a feature of language known as aspectuality. So instead of speaking of a “progressive tense,” we will talk of a “progressive aspect.”

A form of the verb ending in -ing is traditionally called a gerund, a present participle, or a gerund-participle. In this course, we’ll stick with gerund, to avoid confusion (as it does not carry tense, and there’s another form we call the participle).

(36) Reaching the summit of the mountain, Bob let out a shout of triumph.

In the example above, the act of reaching the summit does not occur in the present. It occurs simultaneously with the action of shouting, which is in the past tense. To form a present participle, all you need to do is take the base form of the verb and add –ing: spend + -ing = spending be + -ing = being make + -ing = making As the final example shows, there may be a minor spelling change, but that should not obscure the basic regularity of the whole process. Gerunds are completely regular in English. Every verb forms it exactly the same way, even the so-called irregular ones. Although every present participle ends in -ing, not every word that ends in -ing is a present participle:

(37) The painting on the wall is a copy of a Rembrandt. (Noun) (38) The host was charming to her guests. (Adjective)

(39) Veronica was charming her guests. (Participle)

While painting in the first sentence is clearly a noun (among other things, it follows a determiner), the other two may need glossing. In the second sentence, charming is an adjective. It denotes a quality of the host, and thus the verb is simply was. In the final example, Veronica is doing something to her audience; i.e., charm is a transitive verb. Notice that while you can add the degree adverb very to the adjective in (38), you cannot do so to the participle in (39):

(38b) The host was very charming to her guests.

(39b) *Veronica was very charming her guests.

Meaning and Use of the Progressive

The progressive is most commonly used to indicate a temporary condition, namely that: 1. the event takes time to occur, rather than happening all at once; 2. the event lasts for a limited time. With some verbs, the progressive shows that the event is not necessarily complete:

(40) Simple past: I read Margaret Atwood’s latest novel yesterday.

(41) Past progressive: I was reading Margaret Atwood’s latest novel yesterday.

Because progressives specify a block of time, they are frequently used for actions that overlap some other point in time:

(42) When Mark came home he found that his girlfriend was throwing all his belongings out of the window.

Because the simple present often implies habitual action, the present progressive is typically used to refer to an individual event that has a present time referent:

(43a) What does Mark do over there in the corner?

(43b) What is Mark doing over there in the corner?

Sentence 43a only makes sense if Mark performs some action regularly in the corner. For this reason, a number of ESL textbooks call the present progressive the “present tense,” a potential source of confusion for ESL learners. Because the progressive stresses a temporary state, it generally cannot be used with verbs that describe a permanent quality or state of being:

(44) *He is knowing English very well.

(45) *She is being from Guatemala.

(46) *Norma is having red hair.

The progressive can be used with some state verbs to imply a temporary state. In the a-versions of the sentences below, the situation is permanent, where the b-version implies that the state has a finite duration. Simple present:

(47a) The Lees live in Kwangju.

(48a) Bart is a brat.

Present progressive:

(47b) The Lees are living in Kwangju this summer.

(48b) Bart is being a brat.

3) Perfect construction