1. VERBS

2. Identifying a verb is the easy part
Identifying a verb is the easy part. The challenge comes in knowing its various forms.
Traditionally, a verb is considered to have 3 principal parts: present tense, past tense, past participle. If you had a traditional grammar education (unlikely), you memorized patterns like this:
Sing sang have sung
Ring rang have rung
See saw have seen
Run ran have run
The first verb is the present tense; the second is the past tense. Let’s stop there for the moment.

3. The pure, naked form of the verb is the infinitive
The pure, naked form of the verb is the infinitive. An infinitive is to + verb:
to run to write to see
to be to do to lift
to cry to drive to laugh
These are the forms you find in the dictionary. If you want to know how to say “went” in another language, you probably won’t find “went” in the dictionary. You can’t say “to went.” You say “to go.” So you have to look up “go” & then put it in the past tense of that language.

4. We don’t use infinitives nearly as frequently as we do conjugated verbs. “Conjugated” means that it matches the person:
to run
present past
I run we run I ran we ran
you run y’all run you ran y’all ran
he runs they run he ran they ran
“To run” is easy. Let’s look at “to be”:
to be
I am we are I was we were
you are y’all are you were y’all were
he is they are he was they were

5. Besides the infinitive, there are 4 other verb forms to learn for each verb: present, past, present participle, past participle.
Present & past are fairly easy:
laugh, laughed touch, touched play, played
Most verbs form the present by dropping the “to” from the infinitive, & they form the past by adding “-d” or “-ed” to the present. BUT there are tons of irregular past tense verbs. Go to the next slide for a brief list.

7. Yeah. Now is the time to be glad you speak English as your native language & don’t have to memorize all those irregular verbs.
The verb form in the third column on the previous slide is the past participle. The past participle is the form that goes with have, has, or had:
had laughed had talked had jumped
Most past participles are the same as the past tense: laughed/had laughed; talked/had talked; jumped/had jumped. But there are a number of irregularities:
ate/had eaten saw/had seen bit/had bitten

8. As an educated native speaker of English, you automatically use the correct verb form. However, far too many times, students say “have went” or “have rang.” You should look over the list of irregularities (make it big enough to see) to be sure that you haven’t been using the wrong form of a verb without realizing it.
(Linguist’s note: if everyone around you says “has went,” you might choose to go with the flow, but you should know what the correct form is in case you find yourself surrounded by a group of people who “know better.”)

9. OK, so we have the infinitive, the present, the past, & the past participle. There’s one more form that all verbs have: the present participle.
running singing being telling eating
You guessed it: you add –ing to the infinitive (without “to”). Sometimes you have to double the final consonant, but that’s just one of those annoying spelling rules. At least there aren’t any irregularities.

10. So although there are, traditionally, 3 principal verb forms
present past past participle
ring rang (has) rung
there are really 5:
Infinitive present past past part. present part.
to ring ring rang (has) rung ringing
to be is/am/are was/were (has) been being
So if you know all 5, you know all forms the verb can take.

11. Now for the hard part: what do we do with all these parts?
English has 6 tenses:
present -- I talk present perfect – I have talked
past I talked past perfect I had talked
future -- I will talk future perfect -- I will have talked
The future always has “will.” The perfect tenses always have “have/has/had.” So the future perfect has “will” & “have.”

12. My living here is complete up to this point. The difference between
Chances are that you, as a native speaker of English, use 4 of the 6 tenses correctly with few problems. But the past perfect & future perfect tenses are sometimes problematic even for native speakers.
We all know what present, past, & future are. You need to know that “perfect” means “complete,” so all perfect tenses are past tenses, even, believe it or not, the future perfect.
The present perfect is complete but has an intimate connection to the present:
I have lived here for 14 years.
My living here is complete up to this point. The difference between
I lived here for 14 years. & I have lived here for 14 years.
is that in the second sentence, I continue to live here.
Now consider this: what’s the difference between the 2 sentences below?
I didn’t eat breakfast I haven’t eaten breakfast.
In the first sentence, it’s all over. No chance I’m getting food. In the second, I still may eat it.

13. Easy enough so far, right? Let’s look at the past perfect.
The past perfect tense is the past of the past.
We went to Scotland last year. We had made reservations, but when we arrived, we found that the hotel had lost them.
“Went” is in the past. But even before “we went,” we made reservations. So the making of the reservations happened before the past event of “we went” & is, therefore, the past of the past.
Also, “we arrived” is in the past. But before the action of our arrival, the hotel lost the reservations. So the arrival is in the past, but the loss of the reservations happened even before that & is therefore the past of the past.

14. So what about the future perfect
So what about the future perfect? If the past perfect is the past of the past…you guessed it, right? The future perfect is the past of the future:
We will have finished the paper by Friday.
Friday’s in the future. At some point between now & Friday, the paper will be completed. It will be completed in Friday’s past.
Consider this timeline:
past perfect pres.perf. PRESENT fut.perf. future
____|_________|_________|_________|______|_____
past |
This shows where each tense (time) occurs in reference to the present. The past & present perfect actually occur at the same time (e.g., I didn’t eat breakfast/I haven’t eaten breakfast). Usage depends on whether you view the action as totally in the past or as being involved with the present.

15. So now you know what to do with four of the five verb forms
So now you know what to do with four of the five verb forms. We didn’t discuss what to do with the present participle (-ing). You know how to use that, but we’ll be seeing more of it, the past participle (had talked), & the infinitive (to talk) after you’ve nailed down the verb basics.

16. Click here to go to your assignment. And here to go to the second one.
--do 6-16