How many tenses are there in English?

Discuss any questions in English. Practise your writing skills.

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ivorfuzzle
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#1

Сообщение ivorfuzzle »

This is an off-shoot of thie followng opic in the Russian section of the forum:
Michelangelo (Сколько в английском времен?)
Ok, my contention is that English has a total of 16 tenses.
here is how I count them:
English verbs (for the most part) have 4 aspects:
simple - to do
continuous - to be doing
perfect - to have done
perfect continuous - to have been doing
For all of these there exist present and past finite forms
I do ->I did
I am doing - > I was doing
I have done - > I had done
I have been doing -> I had been doing
And all of these also exist in the passive voice (to be done, to be being done, to have been done, to have been being done)
That gives us 4*2*2=16 tenses
English does not have a future tense, instead it uses the expression to be going to, modal verbs and various present tenses to talk about future actions.
It could be argued that in modern English there is a new emergent passive form, the so called 'get passive', but in the get passive, the verb get essentially acts as the principal verb and all the same rules apply.
Discuss
tourist
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#2

Сообщение tourist »

Discuss
Yeah, that'll be the day!

PS I've got no horse in this race )
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acapnotic
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#3

Сообщение acapnotic »

Shouldn't tenses reflect temporal differences? Be it time or duration? If so, then voice is irrelevant here.

Sorry if it has already been discussed in those 12 pages in Russian. It would take me too long to read them.
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Yety
ivorfuzzle
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#4

Сообщение ivorfuzzle »

acapnotic пишет: 16 ноя 2018, 21:03 Shouldn't tenses reflect temporal differences? Be it time or duration? If so, then voice is irrelevant here.

Sorry if it has already been discussed in those 12 pages in Russian. It would take me too long to read them.
Good point, in that case there are only 8
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