Grammar: Tense, and Verbals. Everything you wanted to know, but were afraid to ask. · 2:35pm Sep 11th, 2013
Ok, people! It's grammar time!
Okay, that took hilariously no time at all to make.
What, I'm a grammar nerd, not an artist.
Stop looking at me like that.
You don't even know how excited I am. Where do I start? Which tool should I use first? (Normally at this point you, the victimreader would be forced to pick torture devicegrammar lesson. Sadly the time-frame won't permit me to garner this information from the future, so you'll just have to suggest future torture devicesgrammar lessons in the comments!)
Let's begin!
Verbals!
I'll be diverting from the alluded sequence of sections in hopes that it makes more sense this way. A verbal (either a noun or adjective) is a part of speech that is derived from a verb form. Basically this comes in two main forms: gerunds and participles. To understand what this is imagine first, if you will, a verb. Let's use something simple like: "to swim". That is a verb. That indicates action. However, in English, we are able to morph this to fit our speech. We can use this to create a noun or adjective, and in doing so we create a "verbal" (verbal noun or verbal adjective). I'll cover those next:
Gerunds!
Gerunds are when you use a verb as a noun. This always looks like an -ing "form" of the verb. Take the example sentence: "She really likes swimming." In this sentence "swimming" does not function as a verb (the verb is "to like", if this were a two-verb sentence it would read "She really likes to swim" because you never conjugate the second verb in a sentence.) "Swimming" actually functions as a noun here, as an object. A direct object, actually.
Participles!
Participles are the adjectival forms of verbs. There are 2 participial forms: present and past. The present participle also, oddly enough, is the "-ing" form of the verb. So, "swimming", while TOTALLY a gerund (as indicated in the previous section), is also a present participle. Confused yet? Take this example: "Swimming, she kicked her feet as quickly as she could." The "Swimming" at the beginning of the sentence is functioning as an adjective, describing the action that is happening.
The past participle is the "-ed[1]" form of a verb. When used adjectivally it looks like this: "Tired, she stopped kicking her feet."
Now, Comrade, you might say, you keep saying "when used adjectivally", but when can you use a participle that isn't adjectivally, if it's the adjectival form of the verb? Well, my hypothetical person paying attention, I'll tell you: compound tenses! (dat segue)
Tenses!
Now, you might think you understand tenses. I certainly know I thought I understood tenses, mind you, but there are a lot of tenses. There are seventeen distinct tenses in the English language. Seventeen! The reason for this is compound tenses. A compound tense has two "parts" to it, a helping verb and a participle, in that order. As you might recall, you always conjugate the first verb ONLY in a sentence, and this is always the helping verb. And hey! You guys have it easy, in English we only have one helping verb: "to have"; in the Romance languages I've studied you have two: "to have" and "to be", and different verbs take different helping verbs. This, by the way, is the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs I talked about in my previous grammar blog post! It's all connected! I digress. The tenses are just the different combinations of conjugated helping verb and participle. Participles in compound tenses are used adverbially, rather than adjectivally, I should mention. They are, after all, being used to describe the helping verb.
Tense is used to provide a time-frame. You can think of tenses as existing on a timeline, of sorts. The different tenses help to paint a picture of the events of your story, and knowing the right tense for the job can allow you more freedom in telling your tale.
I'll preface an actual description of the tenses with a few terms you should probably know:
Perfect: The grammatical use of the word describes a completed, finished, or perfected event.
Progressive: Used to describe ongoing action relative to the tense chosen.
(I'll use third person singular as the basic conjugation for each tense)
Present!
Present Indicactive: He verbs.| Also known as the Simple Present, it is used to describe simple actions that are happening in the present moment. It is usually interchangeable with...
Present Progressive: He is verbing.| Interchangeable with the Simple Present, it is used to describe ongoing action.
Present Perfect: He has verbed.| Used to indicate in the present that an event has passed without indicating any time-frame. Focuses entirely on the RESULT of the past event, rather than on its passing.
Present Perfect Progressive: He has been verbing| Used to indicate that the current action has continued from the immediate past.
Past!
Simple Past: He verbed| Used to indicate a definite time-frame for a past action. In other words, it either happened once, never, or multiple times. This contrasts with other past tense conjugations.
Past Progressive: He was verbing| Contrary to the Simple Past, the Past Progressive shows an ongoing action relative to another time-frame.
Past Perfect: He had verbed| I like to think of the past perfect as the super-past. It indicates that even relative to a past event, this event is "more past". Places emphasis on the FACT, not the duration.
Past Perfect Progressive: He had been verbing| The Past Perfect Progressive, however, places emphasis on the duration of the event in the super-past. Fun fact: the Past Perfect and the Past Perfect Progressive can sometimes be interchangeable.
Future!
Simple Future: He will verb| Typically this indicates a spontaneous action, or an action in the future that cannot be influenced.
Simple Future (going to): He is going to verb Places emphasis on the decision to act in the future. Can also show be used to show the action is the conclusion of some series of events, or deduced from some element of logic.
Future Progressive: He will be verbing| Indicates an ongoing action in the future.
Future Perfect: He will have verbed| Are you getting the hang of this, yet? This refers to the FACT that the action will, in the future, have been done.
Future Perfect Progressive: He will have been verbing| And this one, as you might be able to deduce at this point, indicates that a point in the future, this action will be ongoing, and placing emphasis on the course of action.
Conditional![2]
Simple Conditional He would verb| Indicates an action that might take place.
Conditional Progressive He would be verbing| Indicates an action that might take place while drawing emphasis on course or duration of action.
Conditional Perfect He would have verbed| An action that MIGHT have taken place in the past.
Conditional Perfect Progressive He would have been verbing An action that might have taken place in the past, focusing on the course or duration of action.
Conclusion!
You can certainly get by without this knowledge, and you can even be a great writer! So why, then, should you take the time to learn this stuff? In my opinion a greater understanding of the tools at your disposal will only make you more capable of choosing the right one for any given passage. After all, we, as writers, use words as building blocks to build worlds, so why then is it so strange to want to know the differences between the component pieces?
If there is anything you didn't understand, please ask in the comments. You probably aren't the only one wondering, and I can always update this as needed to clarify. Grammar is hard, and we, as native speakers, hardly learn more than the scant basics in school, so don't feel bad if any of this goes over your head.
Cheers,
-Comrade
[1] - Please note that, as is English's wont, there is an abundance of exceptions to past participles. Things like "spoken", "brought", "dealt", "spent", etc.
[2] - A lot of sources don't include Conditional as its own tense, but I initially was also going to cover mood as well, and the Conditional tense provides a good segue to that. If you disagree with me putting it there, I'll just say to blame it on my French/Spanish lessons—that is where I learned most of this stuff. For those who are curious, "would" is actually a modal verb, which ties intrinsically in with Tense-Aspect-Mood, the broader subject I was hoping to go over a bit here. In the end I think that it's more than most anyone needs to know, though, so I decided to focus on more practical things.
... I keep forgetting you are on FiMFiction.
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What does that even mean
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A problem some people seem to be having is with the parts of speech. It's a bit of knowledge I erroneously omitted, assuming it known. It's my fault. Is anyone interested in a supplemental blog post covering that?
Could I add a link to this post in the Writer's Resource?
And yes I would most definitely be interested in a supplemental blog post.
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Feel free! My aim with these grammar blogs are to try to help writers.
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Ditto, that was my goal when I made the resource. I spent so much time looking for quality guides and writing tips. Which are just scattered every which way on FimFiction, that all I could think was "Man! I wish that someone would collect all this stuff in one place so I could spend more time actually writing!" And realized, heck, Instead of complaining about it, I should just do it.
Anyways thanks, and let me know if you write any more of these, I'll be happy to add them in when I get the time.
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If you like the blog posts you could always follow me and get updates as I post them
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Posted now, I'll copy it over to RR tonight. Fiction Fan has been sending me loads of online articles. Tense and Verbals.
I'm hilariously bad at remembering the names of all these things. Man, that's primary school stuff