Delahunty and Garvey
rate on our discussion of English tenses. While we believe that every (Eng-
lish) teacher should have a good understanding of the tense system, we feel
that a more detailed knowledge is most essential for teachers responsible for
the education of students for whom English is a second (or later) language.
However, as we ground our discussion of English tenses in their character-
istic uses in texts, we believe that all teachers will find information of value
in this appendix.
As we noted, every main clause and many types of subordinate clause in
English are marked for tense. Tense is one way of indicating when the situ-
ation represented by the clause occurs. In order to sensibly talk about tense,
we must first talk a little about time and some other ways in which time is
indicated in English.
We conceptualize time as a line stretching indefinitely far into the past and
indefinitely far into the future. The past is behind us and the future before us.
(Note the spatial metaphor here.) The past is time already gone; the future is
time yet to come. However, times are past, present, or future in relation to
some chosen point of time. That point can be either fixed or variable. The
fixed time may be the time of an important cultural event, for example, the
birth of Christ in the western tradition or the birth of Mohammed in the
Muslim tradition. The variable time is typically when an utterance is spoken,
the time of utterance, “now.” However, in narratives and other text types,
“now” is determined within the text.
Identifying the time at which situations occur relative to the fixed point
of time depends on systems for measuring time. We use cyclic occurrences
such as days, months, and years for measurement from the fixed time point.
So, as we write this, the year is the 2008th year following the birth of Christ.
The choice of the beginning year is relatively arbitrary, but some selection
must be made and going back to the Big Bang is a bit inconvenient.
Exercise
- Do all languages/cultures have seven day weeks? Two day weekends?
Four season years? Twelve month years? Solar years? - Do other languages/cultures divide their days into segments similar to
ours? - English has a number of ways of expressing dates, some used pri-
marily in the written language and some more likely to occur in the
spoken language. For example, 8/22/07 is a written form. (a) Create