Delahunty and Garvey
- Find five more performative verbs and put them in appropriate sen-
tences. Include now and hereby to be sure you really have created per-
formative sentences. What happens if you change the simple present to
another tense and/or aspect?
Reviews
Reviews of books, records, videos, movies, software, and the like are pri-
marily (though certainly not exclusively) written in the simple present. For
example, This review, therefore, describes not only the contents... (College
English 40, 1: 72). The book is suitable for students... (Language 73, 4: 862).
Reporting verbs such as say, suggest, and claim generally occur in the
simple present in reviews to represent what the author of the reviewed item
has written: In a recent book on literacy, for example, Baynham (1995) sug-
gests that literacy always serves social purposes... (TESOL Quarterly 30, 1:
163).
Exercise
Pick a review from any of the journals in the fields of TESOL, linguistics, or
English studies and identify the reporting verbs and the tenses they occur in.
Hear and tell
In ordinary conversation when we want to report what someone recently
said to us, we can use the simple present of verbs such as hear and tell: I hear
you passed your exams, Maya tells me that you have been ill.
Exercise
The following text is from the novel, Mr Phillips, by John Lanchester
(2000: 28). (a) Identify all the simple present tense verbs, both regular
and irregular in the passage. (b) Discuss each one using the framework
for understanding present tense presented just above. (c) You should
also note that a few past tense verbs also occur. Why do you think the
author shifts to the past tense as he does? (d) While the past tense is
the basic, most frequently used tense in novels, the basic tense of this
novel is the present tense. Why do you think that the writer might have
chosen the present tense as basic for this novel? To help you answer this
question, you might change all the present tense verbs into the past