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All the "pluperfect" and "preterit" (sp?) stuff makes my head swim. I have tried to make a list of all the different basic sentence types using a common theme. Could somebody identify the term for each one, and also inform me if I'm missing anything?

I eat tacos

I will eat a taco

I would eat a taco

I am eating a taco

I had eaten a taco

I have eaten a taco

I would have eaten a taco

I will have eaten a taco

I ate a taco

Me eat taco! <= cave-man speech

B. Clay Shannon-B. Crow Raven
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    Related: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/21846/how-do-the-tenses-and-aspects-in-english-correspond-temporally-to-one-another – Kit Z. Fox Jun 10 '14 at 13:53
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    There are plenty more—the sky’s the limit. “I would have been eating a taco”, “I will have had been eating a taco”, etc. Not to mention the complexity you get if you include other constructions than just the ones that use have and will as their auxiliaries. English has only two real tenses: present and past. Everything else is circumlocution, and there’s not real, significant structural difference between “I would eat a taco”, “I could eat a taco”, and “I ought to have been able to want to have to eat a taco”. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 10 '14 at 13:54
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    I ought to have had been wanting to have had been eating a taco. – Andy Jun 10 '14 at 14:16
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    @Andy more fun to try to do it just with modals alone. I ought to have had been daring to have had been eating a taco. – Jon Hanna Jun 10 '14 at 15:11
  • Sweet Jesus, Jon, you've created a monster. – Lou Jun 10 '14 at 17:51
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    Or should I say, you might have had been in the process of possibly creating a monster ;) – Lou Jun 10 '14 at 17:51
  • I have created a table that shows some of these sentences translated into Spanish by the two leading online translation sites here: http://jsfiddle.net/clayshannon/LU7qm/16/ – B. Clay Shannon-B. Crow Raven Jun 11 '14 at 15:25

1 Answers1

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Think of the sentences in terms of a subject, a verb, and the object. "I" is the subject, "eat" is the verb, and "a taco" or "tacos" is the object. The main difference in all of your examples except the first and the last is the verb, but more specifically the verb phrase. A verb phrase can be made up of three different parts: at the minimum, it must have a verb, like "eat". It can also have a modal auxiliary verb such as "will", "might", "can", or their negative forms "will not", "might not", can not", like "can eat", "might eat", "will eat". It can also have a primary auxiliary verb, of which there are three: "to have", "to be", and "to do". The verb itself has to change according to the other parts of the verb phrase. So a full verb phrase could be something like "might be eating" or "might have eaten", which has changed only the primary auxiliary from "to be" to "to have", and the verb "to eat" has changed accordingly. Or another verb phrase is "will have eaten" and "will have ate", in which case the tense of the verb.

You change tense and aspect by changing the primary and modal auxiliary verbs in the verb phrase. So in your sentences, the tense and aspect is what's changing.

I eat tacos

This is present tense, without aspect. Aspect is signalled with either the primary auxiliary "to have" or "to be".

I will eat a taco

This is sort-of present tense; as another commenter pointed out, we only really have present tense and past tense in English, but we use the modal auxiliary "will" to signal future time. Again, no aspect.

I would eat a taco

Again present tense and no aspect. This expresses the conditional using the modal auxiliary "would".

I am eating a taco

Again present tense, and this uses the progressive aspect, which shows an action that is still happening. Progressive aspect uses the primary auxiliary "to be" (which is conjugated as "am")

I had eaten a taco

This is past tense, and uses the perfect aspect, which shows an action that was previously completed. Perfect aspect is signalled by the primary auxiliary "to have" (conjugated as "had" according to past tense.)

I have eaten a taco

This is present tense, perfect aspect.

I would have eaten a taco

Present tense, perfect aspect, and conditional - you've got a full verb phrase here with a modal, primary and a verb.

I will have eaten a taco

Kinda-sorta-future-tense-but-really-present-tense, perfect aspect.

I ate a taco

Simple: aspectless past tense.

Other languages have a variety of words for different tenses, and we could probably bring over the concepts into English too, but really we only have two tenses: present and past. Think of your sentences like Lego bricks: you can use different auxiliaries to come up with different structures. The analogy slightly falls down when you remember that you have to change the verb according to the other parts of the sentence, and according to what auxiliaries you're using, but the point I'm trying to emphasise is that you can mix and match quite a bit with these things. So it would probably take a while to give an exhaustive account of every verb phrase structure there is, and I'm not sure there's even a finite number.

As for your first sentence:

I eat tacos

All that's changed here is the object, in particular the noun phrase "tacos". In your other sentences you use the noun phrase "a taco", with the indefinite article "a" and the singular form of the noun, and here you use the noun phrase "tacos", which has no article and uses the noun's plural form.

In your last sentence:

Me eat tacos

The pronoun has changed. "I" is the first-person singular subject pronoun, "me" is the first-person singular object pronoun. What's happened here is that the object pronoun has been put in the subject position: we know as English speakers that that's wrong, hence why we associate this with "primitive" speech. "Tacos eat me" is grammatically correct however, because the object pronoun is being used as the object (as another user rightly points out it's not semantically correct though, because it doesn't make sense.)

Lou
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