Questions tagged [tenses]
A set of forms taken by a verb to indicate the time and/or completeness and continuance of the action in relation to the time of the utterance.
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Confusion regarding "since" vs "for" [migrated]
I know that we use "since" when we refer to some specific event that started at some point in the past and is still continuing and "for" when we talk about the duration of the ...
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Use of tense in a completed project description [migrated]
I am preparing a project portfolio for a job application in which I describe some of my completed projects in my current role. While the software is still in use today, the projects themselves are ...
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Should we use 'will' or 'would' in the context where the show in question is supposed to start on a date much latter than when the message is sent? [migrated]
Should we use will or would in the following context where the show in question is supposed to start on a date much latter than when the message is sent?
I wanted to know when the show in Paris will/...
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Using the Present Perfect and the Past Simple after the preposition "before" in an adverbial clause [migrated]
KOTB: (Voiceover) Behind the shouting, behind the intense focus on basketball, coach is busy doing for these girls what he's been doing for 26 years. Shaping young lives. His reach extends well beyond ...
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Tense that would include past, present and the future?
If I say "I was athletic", It means it was in the past.
If I say "I have been athletic", it means I was in the past and I remain athletic today.
Is there any way to say "I was,...
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Is the imperative a grammatical tense?
Here I have read the following sentence:
Write it, along with the rest of your message, in the imperative tense:
Up until now I always thought that imperative is not a grammatical tense but a ...
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Tense usage in counterfactual conditionals with non-counterfactual clauses
Imagine the following situation:
My superior is to come with an inspection is a few hours. The visit is expected to be quite unpleasant and therefore I write to my absent coworker to urge him to come:
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When it comes to names and pronouns, what takes precedence: past, present, or future?
This answer on Chess Stack Exchange said it’s grammatically incorrect to call someone by their current pronoun in a sentence talking about a hypothetical future scenario when their pronoun would be ...
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Using "might" in past tense [duplicate]
I'm aware that "may" is generally present tense and "might" is generally past tense, but I came across a sentence in my writing that made me think I might have switched to present ...
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What is the name of the tense referred to in a conditional clause relative to a subjunctive sentence?
Is the word "was" correct? How would you describe the grammatical tense?
Sometimes the yogurt would have a bit of an off-taste, and we would wonder if the batch was going bad because of the ...
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Do you back-shift the tense if <present perfect> + <present perfect>
Could someone clarify if the tense should be back-shifted when the main clause is present perfect.
A: James has already watched the film.
B: James has already emailed me about it.
A+B (without ...
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Present simple or future conditional
While writing a research proposal, I encountered the following issue. Consider the following two variants:
Present simple:
I would like to measure X. Finding evidence that X is large is helpful to ...
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Is it okay to use the past simple tense to describe continuous action in a chapter's opening sentence?
Consider:
CHAPTER 7.
Reclining on the couch, Sofonisba WAS STUFFING her face with Horatius’
omelet, chasing it down with tomato juice and occasionally adjusting
her unbrushed dyed hair.
OR:
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The tense and meaning of 'Would have changed' [closed]
In an article, a film director talks about her film. "It says something about a woman, about a way of living a life, about life after the war. It was the first thing I had to pour out of myself&...
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Common/natural ways we might use the continuous and perfect continuous for the verb "to be" ("will be being", "will have been being")?
I was trying to construct example sentences of the verb "to be" in the usual 12 tenses (or tense-aspects).
First we have these sentences (no problem here):
Simple
Present: He is a teacher.
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