5

I know that "tense" indicates time. If that is true, then not every sentence can be indicated of its tense.

Please review these sentences:

"If I could go to the market , I must have taken breakfast (by now)."
"If this great mountain was given my secret, it would have broken."
"If she were tall like you, she would never have asked you to pick those clothes for her."

Here all these sentences have main clauses in past, but I don't know whether past indefinite or not.

Still, these are imaginary conditions, supported by “if”; so can we say that these sentences have no tense?

Some people told me that their roots are in the present as we are indicating the absence of the mentioned conditions implies that the sentence indicates the present continuous, or some other sort of present.

But that sounds strange, as the sentence itself does not narrate the absence of that condition but only the supposition of “if” that were true... so what is the tense. Thnx for all responses. Now i can safely say that this sentence is making use of auxiliary modals in subjunctive mood. Still according to my perspective, it indicates towards a timeless phenomenon( Though no one knows about the future) still its pointing towards a timeless phenomenon, still if someone wants to refer it to a tense, i think its is present indefinite because it indicates that i am not a bird. "If I were" suggests that I am not.Otherwise the sentence itself does not refer to time. And as i have understood English language does not make use of tense only to indicate time, the total sentence structure depends on many thing sand also the mood of sentence changes the total outlook of any sentence. So tense and/ or mood can be understood if they indicate real things rather imaginary ones.

I failed to understand any better through these answers.

Aleena
  • 159
  • It will help if we know what languages you are familiar with, since different languages deal with tense, mood, and aspect differently. English tenses often do not indicate time, and this is one occasion where they don't. Some people call it Subjunctive, though that's just a name and doesn't explain anything. – John Lawler Dec 28 '12 at 18:24
  • Welcome to ELU, Aleena. This is an excellent question. May I ask whether you have studied the subjunctive in English yet? – StoneyB on hiatus Dec 28 '12 at 18:27
  • (See, someone has already called it "subjunctive" :-) – John Lawler Dec 28 '12 at 19:15
  • How is this question different from your previous one, What tense is “If I were a bird, I could fly”? More to the point, how does @JohnLawler's answer there not answer this question as well? Lastly, what makes you think that a sentence must have a tense? Here are some sentences for you: "Yes." "Hello." "Oops." "Next week". "C." "O ye of little faith!" – RegDwigнt Dec 28 '12 at 19:27
  • @JohnLawler Just a ranging shot. :) If she's studied it it's probably under that name. ... And I see now you already answered this yesterday. – StoneyB on hiatus Dec 28 '12 at 19:27
  • Do you then actually really mean, “Does every sentence have a time?”, if by tense you mean time? That might be a clearer question. But what is time? Just past, present, and future? Is that enough? Too much? Just right? Is Goldilocks still there? – tchrist Dec 31 '12 at 20:46

1 Answers1

6

To answer the official question, in every sentence (not every clause, but every sentence) the first verb in the main verb phrase must be one of

  • a Present tense form (am, is, are, have, has, does, do, or Verb + -Z₃, the 3SgPr inflection)
  • a Past tense form (was, were, had, did, or Verb + -ED, the Past inflection)
  • a Modal auxiliary verb (can, could, may, might, will, would, shall, should, must)

English modal auxiliaries are not inflected for tense, so they are either not in any tense or they are always present tense, depending on what kind of theory of tense you're applying. So either all English sentences are in a tense, or there are some that aren't. But that's just how one describes the language -- it doesn't affect the grammar.

Time in English is frequently indicated by tense, but often enough it's also -- or even only -- a matter of the words or constructions used. See the Deixis Lectures for more on expressions of Time.

English tensed verb forms, however, often specifically don't refer to time. For instance, the Present tense, when used with an active verb, is most likely to refer to an habitual occurrence than to the present time. E.g,

  • Bill walks to school means he walks (almost) every time he goes to school.
  • That dog bites means that the dog has been known to bite people on some occasion(s).
  • Mary drives a Toyota means that Mary usually drives (and probably owns) a Toyota.

None of these refer to what Bill, the dog, or Mary are doing at the present time -- neither the time of speaking nor the "present" of a narrative. This is called a generic construction.

The particular use in the original question licenses the use of a past verb form to indicate an unreal supposition, much the way certain regular subjunctive verb endings do in European languages; but only sporadically -- not regularly. This counterfactual conditional construction, like most archaic remnants, is idiomatic, and governed by only a few constructions and verbs. So one finds

  • I wish I were home now.
  • If I were you, ...
  • If I had the money now, I'd give it to you.
Community
  • 1
John Lawler
  • 107,887
  • 1
    English modal auxiliaries are not inflected for tense - yet yesterday you wrote of "certain uses of modals that retain some of their original preterite morphology, e.g, present can and preterite could in When I was 25, I could do 100 pullups; now I can only do 99." Isn't the problem that they are inflected for tense, but you can't count on the inflection to mark tense? – StoneyB on hiatus Dec 28 '12 at 20:05
  • In Proto-Germanic the modals were not deponent; and they're still not in Modern German -- there is a past form and a past participle for müssen, for instance; one can say the equivalents of *I musted leave and *She has musted go there -- but the original preterite morphology (the -d/-t suffix on would, could, should, might, must) is part of the form now, and no longer an inflection in Modern English, any more than the final palatalization of drench is. – John Lawler Dec 28 '12 at 20:32
  • Basically, it's much simpler and more reasonable to think of the historically preterite modal verbs in English as just being other modals. The situations where the old preterite is useful are vanishingly rare; most uses are idiomatic and involve complex constructions. – John Lawler Dec 28 '12 at 20:34
  • @JohnLawler: 1. Why do you say the -d/-t suffix is "no longer an inflection"? Could is still felt to be a different form of (but of the same verb as) can, and the suffix is still felt to carry some function of a past or subjective nature. I'm telling her I can => I told her I could. 2. How do you mean "situations where the old preterite is useful are vanishingly rare"? I would by no means call my could example above "vanishingly rare", nor your own example as quoted by Stoney. – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Dec 29 '12 at 03:48
  • As to "in every sentence (not every clause, but every sentence) the first verb in the main verb phrase must be one of [list]", I don't understand this. While finite verbs come first in the large majority of sentences, one can easily make different constructions: beaten she was not, but abused, absolutely, or to give her all of my money would be stupid, forgive her I cannot, but never would I hurt her, etc. Or do you have a special definition of "main verb phrase"? – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Dec 29 '12 at 03:55
  • Lastly, the present tense does indeed refer to the present in most cases—just not in the same simple way as in "this action is happening right now". Bill walks to school: the situation described surrounds or includes the present. The habit described exists now. That dog bites: idem. Mary drives a Toyota: idem. – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Dec 29 '12 at 03:58
  • If you want me to include all the caveant there are, it's going to be a much longer answer, and much less fun to write. In prototype English sentences, the first verb in the Verb Phrase is either the main verb or an auxiliary. All the auxiliaries are inflected for past or present, except for the modals, which aren't. You can build a theory in which they are inflected past and present -- Geoff Pullum does in his grammar -- but I don't think there's any justification for adding epicycles. – John Lawler Dec 29 '12 at 04:00
  • 2
    @JohnLawler: Ahhh not "caveant"! You're killing me. How do you always find my weak spot? At any rate, you might consider using "nearly every" instead of "ever" in your answer to silence nit-pickers. // She couldn't find her son and lost him. You really don't think treating could as a past form here is acceptable or useful at all? – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Dec 29 '12 at 04:11
  • As long as it's acknowledged as a fossilized past form, and not a productive one. The real problem is giving the wrong impression about what tense means; everybody thinks it's time, instead of inflection. And that just leads to more confusion. – John Lawler Dec 29 '12 at 05:45
  • 2
    @JohnLawler If “everyone thinks” a word means something, how can you say it does not? What is meaning? // Separately, Pullum does many things that many find unjustifiable, so you seem to be in good company there. – tchrist Dec 31 '12 at 20:43
  • I guess everybody thinks that everybody thinks means *everybody* thinks. This may be somewhat exaggerated. – John Lawler Dec 31 '12 at 21:09
  • 1
    I sometimes annoy my more traditionlist friends by asserting that there is no future tense in English. But I think that what John means by "everybody thinks it's time" is not principally about the meaning of the word "tense", it's about an incomplete understanding of a concept, that is widespread. – Colin Fine Jan 01 '13 at 00:43
  • 1
    Erm, +1 but one small niggle: "Be sensible!" <--What tense is be there? ;-) – Araucaria - Him Oct 20 '19 at 19:25
  • @Araucaria: I wouldn't say imperatives are any tense at all. They always use the infinitive form and that is by definition tenseless. Of course imperatives must always refer to the future, but that's time not tense. – John Lawler Dec 13 '19 at 15:38