Teaching Tip
Some languages, such as Chinese, do not mark verbs for tense. Instead, they
indicate the time of an action through modifiers—words like “tomorrow,” “yes-
terday,” and “today.” When students come to our classes with a home lan-
guage that does not include tense, we must anticipate interference during
speaking and writing activities. One effective way to help these students
better grasp the concept of tense is to use contrastive pairs of sentences that
illustrate tensed and untensed verbs. Contrastive pairs consist of examples of
sentences written in nonstandard English beside sentences written in Stan-
dard English, as in:- *The dog bark at Fritz.
- The dog barked at Fritz.
Such work helps students better recognize the difference between how a sen-
tence would look as influenced by their home language and how it looks ac-
cording to English grammar.
Aspect
In addition to tense, verbs have another interesting characteristic calledas-
pect.^4 Aspect provides information about the duration or ongoing nature of an
action. In Standard English, it normally is conveyed by two verb constructions,
theprogressive verb formand theperfect verb form.
Sentences 26 and 27 show progressive verb forms:
- Fredwas washinghis car.
- Fritzis readinga book.
The progressive, as 26 and 27 indicate, consists of a tensed form of the verb
beand a verb that has-ingattached (the-ingsuffix is called thepresent partici-
plemarker), as indicated:
be(marked for tense)verb + ingSentences 28 and 29 show perfect verb forms:- Macarenahas visitedBuggsy before.
- Fred and Fritzhad eatentoo many tacos.
TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR 71
(^4) Black English Vernacular and Standard English have different ways of dealing with tense and as-
pect, a topic examined in chapter 7.