- The bookthat Fritz borrowedwas a first edition.
In these sentences,who, whom,andthatare relative pronouns. These and
others are shown in the following list:
Major Relative Pronouns in English
who whom that
which whose where
when whyVerbs
Ve r b sare the words we use to signify an action or a state of being. They
make up the head of the predicate (they are the head word of the predicate)
and are interesting in large part because they convey so much information in
sentences. For example, actions can occur in the past, present, or future, and
verbs commonly change in relation to the time an action occurred. We call
this featuretense.
Although three tenses are possible,English has only two: past and present.
The future has to be conveyed in a way that does not involve changing the verb.
Sometimes, we use the wordswillorshallto indicate the future, as inWe will eat
soon,but English is flexible and allows us to signify the future in other ways. We
can, for example, use the present to indicate the future, as inWe eat soon.In fact,
English is so flexible that sometimes we also can signify the past by using the
present, as in:So last night he asks me for money. Can you believe it?
Romance languages like Spanish have three tenses, whereas other languages,
such as Hopi, have only one or no tense at all. Differences in verb tense across
languages played an important role in the shift from traditional grammar to mod-
ern grammar in the early 1900s (a topic that we take up in the next chapter).
Comparing English and Spanish verbs illustrates the nature of tense and
how English differs from a Latin-based language. Consider the verbspeak,
which in Spanish ishablar:
Past Present Future
spoke speak Ø
hablé hablo hablaría70 CHAPTER 3