Many English learners find it difficult to grasp the usage of tenses in English, because there is no such a grammatical system in their first language. Even if tenses exist in their first language, the meaning and usage could be quite different from that in English. Do you know how many tenses there are in English? Some people say 3; some say 16; and some even say 32! In fact, it depends on how you define the word ‘tenses’ in English grammar.
Tense is a grammatical system which indicates an idea of closeness in a language. It is related not only to time, but also to space and interpersonal relationship.
Look at the following examples:
(1) I was studying Physics in the library all yesterday morning.
(2) I was wondering if you could tell me where the library is.
In Sentence (1), Past Continuous (was studying) is used to indicate an on-going action that happened in the past; whereas in Sentence (2), I am asking for the direction right now. However, I use ‘was wondering’ because I intend to be polite and create social distance with the stranger. There is nothing to do with time when we use Past Continuous in Sentence (2).
As you can tell from the above 2 examples, we use tenses to indicate how close the event is to our time, to our space, to our social circle, and to the reality. Tense is not merely a temporal system, but rather a complex interpersonal system comprising a myriad of meanings. Therefore, we can mix tenses both in one sentence and in one paragraph for stylistic purposes.
Back to the question ‘how many tenses are there in English’, it depends on how you define tenses. Some people claim there are only 2 tenses in English as there are only present and past forms in a verb. To take an example, ‘study’ is the present form and ‘studied’ is the past. So how about ‘future tense’? In fact, we talk about the future mainly by adding the Modal ‘will’ before the present form of a verb, as in ‘will study’. We don’t change the form of the verb to talk about future, hence no ‘future form’ or ‘future tense’.
Modals, or Modality in functional grammar, is a system closely related to tenses. We use modals to open space for discussion with others. Modals in English include will, would, may, might, shall, should, can, could, must, and ought to. We always use modals to create ‘tenses’ which make more complex meaning, as in ‘will study’, ‘should study’, etc. People tend to include this part of grammar into the system of tenses.
How about verb form such as ‘studying’ and ‘seen’? In fact, apart from Modals, there is a system of Aspect which talks about whether an action is one-off, on-going, repeated, or completed. There are 4 Aspects in total, namely Simple, Continuous (or Progressive), Perfect, and Perfect Continuous. We use Present Participle (or -ing form) and Past Participle (or -ed form) to indicate the aspect of an action. We then combine the Aspect system with other grammatical systems to create ‘tenses’ which make much more complex meaning, as in ‘is studying’, ‘has studied’, ‘has been studying’ ‘will be studying’, ‘should have been studying’, etc.
Then we have the system of Voice, which indicates whether the grammatical Subject acts as a performer (doer) or a receiver (done-to) of an action. There are three voices in total, namely the Active, the Middle, and the Passive. For example, ‘Tom killed the cat’ is an active statement as ‘Tom’ is the performer whereas ‘The cat was killed by Tom’ is a passive statement as ‘The cat’ is the receiver.
All the systems above are related to the verb of a clause. People tend to use ‘Tense’ as an umbrella term to include other systems such as Aspect, Modality, Voice, etc. No wonder some people claim there are 32 tenses in English!
Figure 01: The complex system of verb groups
Figure 02: Tenses, Aspects, Modality, and their forms (Active Voice)
Figure 03: Tenses, Aspects, Modality, and their forms (Passive Voice)