How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tenses

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How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tenses

Post by snappdragon »

My English teacher Mrs. Shirley told me that there are 6 tenses in English: Past, Present, Future, Past Perfect, Present Perfect, and Future Perfect.

The problem with that is that Perfect is an ASPECT, not a tense. She seems very adamant about this however. I even showed her the section on Tense and Aspect in the LCK but her only response was "I'll show you an old book that says there's six tenses"

Can someone please help me explain this too her???
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by mèþru »

TAM combinations are often referred to as tenses, even in linguistics documents.
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Viktor77 »

mèþru wrote:TAM combinations are often referred to as tenses, even in linguistics documents.
Yea we teach subjunctive as a tense in French but I suppose it's technically a mood.

Also French passé composé could be argued to be an aspect, but I don't know anyone who'd do that.
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Ryan of Tinellb »

I remember being surprised, even after finding out the difference between tense and aspect, that English actually only has two tenses, not three (syntactically, at least). Past and non-past. Our "future 'tense'" uses an auxiliary every bit as much as the past perfect does.

Wait, even with the her non-technical meaning of "tense", how does she account for the continuous? That is, the difference between "he eats" and "he is eating"? I can't even remember what to call the TAM in "will have been eating".
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Sumelic »

I wouldn't choose this hill to die on. There are disagreements among respectable linguists about whether the English perfect is better characterized as a tense or as an aspect. Huddleston and Pullum's CGEL calls it a "non-deictic past tense." It's just terminology anyway. Obviously the perfect-vs-nonperfect distinction is more or less orthogonal to the main past-vs.-nonpast tense distinction in English, but it can be seen as a secondary axis of the tense system. Note that it is also orthogonal to the main aspectual distinction in English, progressive vs. non-progressive. So whether you call it "aspect" or "tense," you're probably lumping it in with something else that isn't very closely connected (or rather, something that is closely related as part of TAM, but not much more than the other category).
Last edited by Sumelic on Mon Apr 03, 2017 5:18 pm, edited 4 times in total.

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by mèþru »

@Ryan: You're confusing perfect and perfective.

Also, I thought I made it clear earlier that, while not the most precise terminology, this use can be considered technical because it is actually used in formal linguistics.
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Salmoneus »

snappdragon wrote:My English teacher Mrs. Shirley told me that there are 6 tenses in English: Past, Present, Future, Past Perfect, Present Perfect, and Future Perfect.

The problem with that is that Perfect is an ASPECT, not a tense. She seems very adamant about this however. I even showed her the section on Tense and Aspect in the LCK but her only response was "I'll show you an old book that says there's six tenses"

Can someone please help me explain this too her???

a) It's not classy to name-and-shame RL people to strangers online without their permission.
b) As methru says, any TAM combination can be referred to as a "tense". It's not the meaning of the word that is employed in theoretical linguistic textbooks, but it is a common use of the word, and probably predates the technical meaning.
c) the perfect in particularly is not an aspect.

The perfect is a complex formation, that's sometimes described as:
- anterior events with a posterior significance (tense)
- perfective events with an imperfective significance (aspect)
- realis events with an irrealis significance (mood)

It therefore tends to fit into whichever the dominant system of marking is in each language - it looks like a tense in a tense-based language, like an aspect in an aspect-based one, and like a mood in a modal system.

In English, I think it's legitimate to see it as primarily a tense, albeit one with aspectual connotations. The past perfect, in particular, is usually used as just a plain past anterior tense - "I had already walked into the room" primarily signifies that the walking occured prior to the frame of reference. Note also that there is no clear alternative way to express the past anterior other than by the past perfect. The aspectual element actually seems weakest in English - some past perfects might be said to have perfective significance, and we can also explicitly make the events themselves imperfective ("I had been eating").


So, I would say it's fair to call the perfects "tenses" in English, but at the same time it is worth noting that they are not quite the same as the core tenses.

It also raises the question of whether the prospectives in "going to" and "about to" should also be considered tenses...
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by zompist »

Salmoneus wrote:It's not the meaning of the word that is employed in theoretical linguistic textbooks, but it is a common use of the word, and probably predates the technical meaning.
Other way around. "Tense" is from temps, time. Latin grammars were pretty careful about distinguishing tense, perfect [aspect], mood, and voice.
The past perfect, in particular, is usually used as just a plain past anterior tense - "I had already walked into the room" primarily signifies that the walking occured prior to the frame of reference.
Not exactly. The unmarked way to say that A preceded B is to use the simple past: "I walked into the room, then I sat in the chair."

The past perfect, like the present perfect, is often... a perfect. There are multiple types, e.g. the perfect of result (Bernard Comrie's term), which emphasizes the continuing relevance of the event, or draws attention to its consequences. The perfect usually implies something: "I've eaten (so I don't need to eat again)." "I've had a bath (so I'm clean)". "John has arrived (so the party can begin)." "I've told you before (so you should know)". All of these work in the past perfect as well. There are other perfects, such as the perfect of experience ("I've been to London"), the perfect of persistence ("I've lived here for ten years"), or the perfect of recency ("I've just learned that the wine was poisoned").

We do use the past perfect as a past anterior, which is particularly useful when events are narrated out of order: "I sat down. I had prepared the presents earlier."

Perfects very easily become simple pasts (as in French), which only adds to the confusion.

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Viktor77 »

zompist wrote:Perfects very easily become simple pasts (as in French), which only adds to the confusion.
You didn't mean this exclusively, did you? Because the passé composé is both perfect and simple past. And I've never totally clear on the extent to which the passé composé really is a simple past. It might actually be semantics (or pragmatics?) in that French speakers just use the perfect more often than the simple past because they still have a simple past and it's still used in oral speech, but rarely, and usually to imply some formal register. Ce fut un plaisir is more formal than c'était or ça a été un plaisir. Educated speakers use even more passé simple forms, especially third person singular. It's also apparently becoming a thing on Twitter. A colleague of mine works on the passé simple on Twitter, possibly because it's shorter.

In any case I know Castillian Spanish uses the perfect more than the preterite, so perhaps what French speakers are doing is simple overusing the perfect and so the passé composé isn't really a simple past? Or at least it isn't exclusively (since French still has the plus que parfait).

My colleague tells me Italian doesn't use its simple past anymore either in speech (except sometimes in the south).
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by linguoboy »

Viktor77 wrote:In any case I know Castillian Spanish uses the perfect more than the preterite, so perhaps what French speakers are doing is simple overusing the perfect and so the passé composé isn't really a simple past? Or at least it isn't exclusively (since French still has the plus que parfait).
"Overuse" is a prescriptive term. I would argue that it's simply the unmarked way of forming the past tense. Yes, the simple past is occasionally used in speech, but as you say this is always a marked choice--an attempt to sound formal, concise, erudite, etc.

In other languages I know, there's often a regional cline with regards to use of the perfect. For instance, in German, it's most widespread in the South, where dialectally it even replaces synthetic forms of auxiliaries and modals (e.g. "S isch emol e Schwob gsii, e badische Alemann un e Berliner..." "There was once a Swabian, an Aleman from Baden, and a Berliner...") although these are usual in vernacular forms of the standard language. Northern Speakers like Hans-Werner sometimes use simple past forms of other verbs in speech, but for me this smacks of literary usage.

Catalan is interesting: it maintains a past/perfect distinction similar to that found in Castilian, but the synthetic forms inherited from Vulgar Latin have been entirely displaced in speech by a periphrastic construction with anar "go", e.g. "Vaig beure'm la seva sang" ("I drank his blood").

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Travis B. »

I like how you call out Hans-Werner as if he were the prototypical northern German-speaker.
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by zompist »

linguoboy wrote:
Viktor77 wrote:In any case I know Castillian Spanish uses the perfect more than the preterite, so perhaps what French speakers are doing is simple overusing the perfect and so the passé composé isn't really a simple past? Or at least it isn't exclusively (since French still has the plus que parfait).
"Overuse" is a prescriptive term. I would argue that it's simply the unmarked way of forming the past tense. Yes, the simple past is occasionally used in speech, but as you say this is always a marked choice--an attempt to sound formal, concise, erudite, etc.
I agree. Because French has an imperfective, however, both the passé composé and the passé simple (usually) imply perfectivity.

[Edit: I hate spellcheck sometimes. Only just noticed that it had changed composé to composed. I make enough typos all by myself, don't need a computer to add more.]

And the French imparfait really is an imperfective, not an imperfect— it deals with the action as a process rather than a point in time. Things are often called perfects in grammars for historical reasons, not out of strict typology.

Of course, we make fiddly distinctions like perfect vs. perfective because some languages have both— e.g. Bulgarian and Hindi.

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Sumelic »

Ryan of Tinellb wrote:I remember being surprised, even after finding out the difference between tense and aspect, that English actually only has two tenses, not three (syntactically, at least). Past and non-past. Our "future 'tense'" uses an auxiliary every bit as much as the past perfect does.

Wait, even with the her non-technical meaning of "tense", how does she account for the continuous? That is, the difference between "he eats" and "he is eating"? I can't even remember what to call the TAM in "will have been eating".
Well, tenses can be marked with auxiliaries. As others have mentioned, the French "passé composé" is standardly analyzed as a past tense. I believe the arguments against considering the English "will + INF" construction a future tense are more complicated than just a matter of it being marked with an auxiliary (and as with the classification of the perfect, there are disagreements among linguists about whether "will + INF" should or shouldn't be called a "tense"). Other things that I think have been used to argue that the construction is not a "tense" are:
  • the fact that the "will + INF" construction has some modal uses in addition to its tense-like uses, such as "Who's at the door?" "Oh, that will be the mailman" = "that must be the mailman." Actually, I don't find this argument very convincing because I think constructions with "tense" as the main meaning often have other less prominent meanings. For example, the English past tense has a modal use in the protasis of conditional clauses.
  • the fact that alternative constructions without "will" are fairly commonly used for verbs referring to the future, such as the simple morphological non-past tense (e.g., in "when" clauses) or the "going to" construction. Also "shall," which I think is standardly grouped in with "will" when the latter is viewed as a future-tense marker, but it's still an added complication and restriction on the distribution of "will" for anyone who still actually speaks a dialect that uses "shall." I think this argument is better, although e.g. French, which has a morphologically marked future tense, also has a construction similar to English "going to" (formed with aller "to go" followed by an infinitive).
  • the fact that "will + INF" behaves morphologically a lot like the other modal verb + INF constructions (which is not true for the perfect construction). Now, morphology isn't everything, and it could be argued that the other modal verb constructions aren't classified as extra tenses because they don't have tense-like semantics (e.g. "can," "should") but "will" does. But in fact, the modal verb "would" is not only morphologically and syntactically similar to "will," it even has a fairly tense-like, if rare, use as a "future in the past" marker. It seems somewhat inconsistent to recognize a present vs. future tense distinction between the two clauses of "I am telling them that I will go," but not a past vs. future-in-the-past tense distinction between the two clauses of "I told them that I would go." To me, this is the most convincing argument against the trichotomous "past-present-future" model for the English tense paradigm.
Last edited by Sumelic on Wed Apr 05, 2017 9:58 pm, edited 3 times in total.

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by snappdragon »

I'm now curious as to how much total linguistic discussion will arise from me being stubborn and wanting to prove a fact to a teacher.
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

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snappdragon wrote:I'm now curious as to how much total linguistic discussion will arise from me being stubborn and wanting to prove a fact to a teacher.
Have you even read all of the above?
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

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Travis B. wrote:I like how you call out Hans-Werner as if he were the prototypical northern German-speaker.
I always wanted to be prototypical. Don't ruin my 15 minutes of fame. ;-)

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Jonlang »

snappdragon wrote:My English teacher told me that there are 6 tenses in English: Past, Present, Future, Past Perfect, Present Perfect, and Future Perfect.
English doesn't even have a proper future tense though, does it? We can only put things in the future by saying "will" or "shall", but English verbs have no future tense themselves, only present (do, go, make) and past (did, went, made).
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Travis B. »

Jonlang wrote:
snappdragon wrote:My English teacher told me that there are 6 tenses in English: Past, Present, Future, Past Perfect, Present Perfect, and Future Perfect.
English doesn't even have a proper future tense though, does it? We can only put things in the future by saying "will" or "shall", but English verbs have no future tense themselves, only present (do, go, make) and past (did, went, made).
I was going to explain this, but realized it had already been explained better than I could, so just read up, please. The fact that English lacks a morphological future is not a good argument for English lacking a future tense, even though much better arguments can be made for why English lacks a future tense. (We don't say that English lacks a perfect just because English has no morphological perfect, do we?)
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

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Travis B. wrote:I was going to explain this, but realized it had already been explained better than I could, so just read up, please. The fact that English lacks a morphological future is not a good argument for English lacking a future tense, even though much better arguments can be made for why English lacks a future tense. (We don't say that English lacks a perfect just because English has no morphological perfect, do we?)
But then what do we do with all of our modals? Are they tenses? Are would, should, could, shall, tenses? Usually they are not considered to be.
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Sumelic »

Viktor77 wrote:
Travis B. wrote:I was going to explain this, but realized it had already been explained better than I could, so just read up, please. The fact that English lacks a morphological future is not a good argument for English lacking a future tense, even though much better arguments can be made for why English lacks a future tense. (We don't say that English lacks a perfect just because English has no morphological perfect, do we?)
But then what do we do with all of our modals? Are they tenses? Are would, should, could, shall, tenses? Usually they are not considered to be.
"Shall" is I think standardly considered to be an alternative future tense marker by people who classify the "will + INF" construction as a future tense.

I edited my previous post to address the issue of modals like "would" (as a conditional marker) and "could." Basically, even though these constructions are morphologically similar to the "will" construction in English, I don't think this by itself would require classifying them all as tenses for consistency. In many languages, mood and tense are marked in similar ways morphologically e.g. by verb affixes (like French "j'aimerai" "I will like/love" vs. "j'aimerais" "I would like/love"). There doesn't seem to be any controversy about these classifications in French because the semantic meaning of "aimerai" is pretty clearly that of a future tense, and the semantic meaning of "aimerais" is pretty clearly that of a conditional (i.e. not a tense). I think it's the similar semantics, not the similar morphology of the English modal verb constructions that really constitutes the best argument against giving "will + INF" a special status apart from the others.

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

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Viktor77 wrote:
Travis B. wrote:I was going to explain this, but realized it had already been explained better than I could, so just read up, please. The fact that English lacks a morphological future is not a good argument for English lacking a future tense, even though much better arguments can be made for why English lacks a future tense. (We don't say that English lacks a perfect just because English has no morphological perfect, do we?)
But then what do we do with all of our modals? Are they tenses? Are would, should, could, shall, tenses? Usually they are not considered to be.
We treat them as modals, and likewise treat will as a modal. My point was just that lack of a morphological future is not a good argument for that English has no future tense.
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

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Sumelic wrote:"Shall" is I think standardly considered to be an alternative future tense marker by people who classify the "will + INF" construction as a future tense.

I edited my previous post to address the issue of modals like "would" (as a conditional marker) and "could." Basically, even though these constructions are morphologically similar to the "will" construction in English, I don't think this by itself would require classifying them all as tenses for consistency. In many languages, mood and tense are marked in similar ways morphologically e.g. by verb affixes (like French "j'aimerai" "I will like/love" vs. "j'aimerais" "I would like/love"). There doesn't seem to be any controversy about these classifications in French because the semantic meaning of "aimerai" is pretty clearly that of a future tense, and the semantic meaning of "aimerais" is pretty clearly that of a conditional (i.e. not a tense). I think it's the similar semantics, not the similar morphology of the English modal verb constructions that really constitutes the best argument against giving "will + INF" a special status apart from the others.
In colloquial NAE the two main competing forms for a future tense are, of course, will, and also be going to, Shall does not feel like a plain future tense IMD for some reason, probably because it is colored similarly to should. But even will and be going to are not exactly interchangeable; will feels more like a pure future tense whereas be going to implies a prospective aspect at times. However, be going to very frequently is used with a purely future meaning as well.
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by linguoboy »

Travis B. wrote:But even will and be going to are not exactly interchangeable; will feels more like a pure future tense whereas be going to implies a prospective aspect at times. However, be going to very frequently is used with a purely future meaning as well.
Will often has an element of volition which is different than what I associate with a "pure future". Consider this: You're in a meeting and someone asks, "Who's taking minutes?" Now consider the possible replies:

"I will."
and
"I'm going to."

Of the two, "I'm going to" feels more like a "pure future". (In fact, it feels so purely future, it doesn't even sound to me like the person necessarily intends to take minutes at that meeting.)

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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by Travis B. »

Good point. So we are left with three "future" like modals or quasimodals, one, will, implies volition, one, be going to, implies prospective aspect, and one, shall, implies obligation or like.
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Re: How to convince an ENG teacher that there aren't 6 Tense

Post by KathTheDragon »

For me, "going to" rather has the sense of immediacy, with "will" being rather unmarked. "shall" then has a sense of intent.

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