TENSES

Grammar: Tenses 

Tense is a term which applies to verbs, and it is used to indicate the time of an action: past, present, future tense. These are the basic categories of tenses we have in English. 

The Past Tense – is used to express a past action. This is indicated in most verbs by adding ‘ed’ or ‘d’ to them. This type of verbs are called the regular verbs.

Example of such verbs are: voted, waited, counted, preached, visited, cured, answered, elected, abrogated, punched, perfected etc. verbs which do not take ‘ed’ or ‘d’ to form their past are called irregular verbs e.g. built, threw, said, paid wore, sent, swam, set, cast, ran, wrote etc. 

The Present Tense – is used to express the current time i.e. now. This tense could be singular or plural and it must agree with the subject in a sentence. 

Examples are vote, wait, say, count, preach, elect, answer(v), remove, empower, tolerate, activate etc. 

The Future Tense –This is done by putting an auxiliary before the verb and so on. Examples are as follows. 

(i) Will + go e.g. I will go tomorrow. 

(ii) Shall + visit e.g. I shall visit you next week

(iii) Be + going e.g. I am travelling next year. 

(iv) Be + -ing verb e.g. She is coming next month 

(v) Be + about to + verb e.g. Theyare about to start the lecture. 

(vi) ‘s’ i.e. progressive form of verbs e.g. the bus leaves tonight.

EVALUATION 

Write out the past tense of the following verbs: fly, cast, let, burn, lose, read, swim, call, bathe, lay, lie, sting, tie, fling.

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