Verb Tense Quotes

He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.

She’s my wife. (Stryker) Was. You seem to have forgotten an important verb tense. (Zephyra)

It was the English word she used. It was in English that the past was unilateral; in Bengali, the word for yesterday, kal, was also the word for tomorrow. In Bengali one needed an adjective, or relied on the tense of a verb, to distinguish what had already happened from what would be.

Was. What does was actually mean? The verb to be. Past tense of is. Does it mean that someone is no longer being?

Anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows only too dearly that languages can be full of pointless irregularities that increase complexity considerably without contributing much to the ability to express ideas. English, for instance, would have losed none of its expressive power if some of its verbs leaved their irregular past tense behind and becomed regular.

and so, as you love me, and he loves me, and I love you with all the moods and tenses of the verb, I send you simply his 'love' instead.

One moment you can say the words 'I am'. And the next, you have no first person, no present tense, and no entitlement, as a subject, to act on verbs of any kind.

In my heart, I knew that Whorf was right. I knew I thought differently in Turkish and English - not because thought and language were the same, but because different languages forced you to think about different things. Turkish, for example, had a suffix, -mis, that you put on verbs to report anything you didn't witness personally. You were always stating your degree of subjectivity. You were always thinking about it, every time you opened your mouth. The suffix -mis had not exact English equivalent. It could be translated as "it seems" or "I heard" or "apparently." I associated it with Dilek, my cousin on my father's side - tiny, skinny, dark-complexioned Dilek, who was my age but so much smaller. "You complained-mis to your mother," Dilek would tell me in her quiet, precise voice. "The dog scared-mis you." "You told-mis your parents that if Aunt Hulya came to America, she could live in your garage." When you heard -mis, you knew that you had been invoked in your absence - not just you but your hypocrisy, cowardice, and lack of generosity. Every time I heard -mis, I felt caught out. I was scared of the dogs. I did complain to my mother, often. The -mis tense was one of the things I complained to my mother about. My mother thought it was funny.

My education and that of my Black associates were quite different from the education of our white schoolmates. In the classroom we all learned past participles, but in the streets and in our homes the Blacks learned to drop s’s from plurals and suffixes from past-tense verbs. We were alert to the gap separating the written word from the colloquial. We learned to slide out of one language and into another without being conscious of the effort. At school, in a given situation, we might respond with “That’s not unusual.” But in the street, meeting the same situation, we easily said, “It be’s like that sometimes.

Remember, constantly, that when you talk about 'tense of a subjunctive,' you're not talking about time. You're slipping through degrees of reality.

I was a crazy creature with a head full of carnival spangles until I was thirty, and then the only man I ever really cared for stopped waiting and married someone else. So in spite, in anger at myself, I told myself I deserved my: fate for not having married when the best chance was at hand. I started traveling. My luggage was snowed under blizzards of travel stickers. I have been alone in Paris, alone in Vienna, alone in London, and all in all, it is very much like being alone in Green Town, Illinois. It is, in essence, being alone. Oh, you have plenty of time to think, improve your manners, sharpen your conversations. But I sometimes think I could easily trade a verb tense or a curtsy for some company that would stay over for a thirty-year weekend.

I started traveling. My luggage was snowed under blizzards of travel stickers. I have been alone in Paris, alone in Vienna, alone in London, and all in all, it is very much like being alone in Green Town, Illinois. It is, in essence, being alone. Oh, you have plenty of time to think, improve your manners, sharpen your conversations. But I sometimes think I could easily trade a verb tense or a curtsy for some company that would stay over for a thirty-year weekend.

Only in the present tense is the subject married to its verb. The action—all action, past and future—comes at the end. At the very end, when there is nothing left to do but act.

Whatever language we speak, before we begin a sentence we have an almost infinite choice of words to use. A, The, They, Whereas, Having, Then, To, Bison, Ignorant, Since, Winnemucca, In, It, As . . . Any word of the immense vocabulary of English may begin an English sentence. As we speak or write the sentence, each word influences the choice of the next ― its syntactical function as noun, verb, adjective, etc., its person and number if a pronoun, its tense and number as a verb, etc. ,etc. And as the sentence goes on, the choices narrow, until the last word may very likely be the only one we can use.

I started going over the lines in my head for this French play I’m in at school. I play a rabbit called Janot Lapin, who’s the leader of a group of farm animals. It’s not the most interesting play in the universe, but we only know three verb tenses so far so we didn’t have a lot of choices. There’s this one scene where I’m really hungry because the landowners aren’t feeding us, and I keep saying, “J’ai faim.” In case you don’t know, that means “I’m hungry,” but it really means “I have hunger.” That’s what real French people say. I think it’s neat how French people have hunger, but they aren’t hungry like Americans are. I mean, it’s a lot easier to try not to have something than to try not to be it.

Few fallacies are more dangerous or easier to fall into than that by which, having read a given book, we assume that we will continue to know its contents permanently, or having mastered a discipline in the past, we assume that we control it in the present. Philosophically speaking, "to learn" is a verb with not legitimate tense.

Verb conjugation has become muddled, as well. Which is correct: “I am a neurosurgeon,” “I was a neurosurgeon,” or “I had been a neurosurgeon before and will be again”? Graham Greene once said that life was lived in the first twenty years and the remainder was just reflection. So what tense am I living in now? Have I proceeded beyond the present tense and into the past perfect? The future tense seems vacant and, on others’ lips, jarring.

watch your tense and case oh baby i want to be your direct object. you know, that is to say i want to be on the other side of all the verbs i know you know how to use. i've seen you conjugate: i touch you touched you heard she knows who cares i'm interested in a few decent prepositions: above, over, inside, atop, below, around and i'm sure there are more right on the tip of your tongue. i am ready to spend the present perfect splitting your infinitive there's an art to the way you dangle your participle and since we're being informal it's okay to use a few contractions, like wasn't (going to) shouldn't (have) and a conjunction: but (did it anyway) and i'm really really glad you're not into dependent clauses since all i'm really interested in is your bad, bad grammar and your exclamation point.

I love you with all the moods and tenses of the verb

Maybe our most real timeline resides in another verb tense.

There’s a language, I think it’s called Mescalero, in which verbs don’t change tenses. There’s no future or past tense in that language. I was thinking… if we could learn that language, we could live longer…

Well, centrum means center,” said Jackie. “Permanebit is a future tense verb. ‘Remains’ is one translation. Or maybe ‘endures.’ Together it’d be something like, ‘the center will endure.’” I jerked my head up. “Hold,” I whispered, my voice cracking. “The center will hold.” Sydney’s last words. Not for Eddie, but for me.

Birdle Burble I went out of mind and then came to my senses By meeting a magpie who mixed up his tenses, Who muddled distinctions of nouns and of verbs, And insisted that logic is bad for the birds. With a poo-wee cluck and a chit, chit-chit; The grammar and meaning don't matter a bit. The stars in their courses have no destination; The train of events will arrive at no station; The inmost and ultimate Self of us all Is dancing on nothing and having a ball. So with a chat for chit and with tat for tit, This will be that, and that will be It! (poem for James Broughton)

That’s the past tense, Tom,’ returned Mr. James Harthouse, striking the ash from his cigar with his little finger.  ‘We are in the present tense, now.’   ‘Verb

(*Yes, I just used the word perioded. A past tense verb, to be precise. This is my book and I’ll perpetuate abuse of the English language if I want to.)

Am” is the linking verb that follows “I” in the present tense when I am no longer present, when I’m shattered. (Page 9).

The future form of the verb is the imbecile’s favorite tense.

In Chinese, I realized, verbs don’t change based on past or present tense. Instead you added a marker to the sentence indicating when an action occurred relative to the moment of speech, and this indication was more akin to an indication of space than of time. So instead of before and after, things happened in front of you and behind you, up the stream and down the stream.

PALESTINE A–Z A An apple that fell from the table on a dark evening when man-made lightning flashed through the kitchen, the streets, and the sky, rattling the cupboards and breaking the dishes. “Am” is the linking verb that follows “I” in the present tense when I am no longer present, when I’m shattered. B A book that doesn’t mention my language or my country, and has maps of every place except for my birthplace, as if I were an illegitimate child on Mother Earth. Borders are those invented lines drawn with ash on maps and sewn into the ground by bullets.

And so their small, subtle verbs mince the universe into tenses, their pronouns and articles slice people into genders. They infect us with the finitude of their visions, their fatal powers.

He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.

The cause of the onset of overgeneralization [of regular past tense forms to irregular verbs] is not a change in vocabulary statistics, but some endogenous change in the child's language mechanisms.

At one stage in the history of English, the past tenses of verbs were marked by a regular vowel change process; instead of “help/helped,” we had “help/holp.” Over time, -ed became the preferred way to mark the past tense, and eventually the past tense of most verbs was formed by adding -ed. But the old pattern was preserved in verbs like “eat/ate,” “give/gave,” “take/ took,” “get/got”—verbs that are used very often, and so are more entrenched as a linguistic habit (the very frequently used “was/ were” is a holdover from an even older pattern). They became irregular because the world changed around them.

The first lesson any veteran inmate teaches a recent arrival is that you must always be clear about your goal: survival. To survive a few more hours and, in this way, gain another day that, added to other days, might become one more week. You must continue like this, never making big plans, never having big goals, only surviving each moment. To live is a verb that makes sense only in the present tense.

I'm trying to tell MiSSSisss WaSShington about our ceremony for Father. But it takes time to match every noun and verb, sort all the tenses, remember all the articles, set the tone for every s. MiSSSisss WaSShington says if every learner waits to speak perfectly, no one would learn a new language. Being stubborn won't make you fluent. Practicing will! The more mistakes you make, the more you'll learn not to. They laugh.

Have you told Julia this about Sebastian?” “The substance of it; not quite as I told you. She never loved him, you know, as we do.” “Do.” The word reproached me; there was no past tense in Cordelia’s verb “to love.

Kant was surely right that our minds "cleave the air" with concepts of substance, space, time, and causality. They are the substrate of our conscious experience. They are the semantic contents of the major elements of syntax: noun, preposition, tense, verb. They give us the vocabulary, verbal and mental, with which we reason about the physical and social world. Because they are gadgets in the brain rather than readouts of reality, they present us with paradoxes when we push them to the frontiers of science, philosophy, and law. And as we shall see in the next chapter, they are a source of the metaphors by which we comprehend many other spheres of life.

from Emerson's journals. In the context, it is written in the past tense; changing the verb to present tense it reads: The poem is a confession of faith. Which is to say, the poem is not an exercise. It is not 'wordplay.' Whatever skill or beauty it has, in contains something beyond language devices, and has a purpose other than itself.

Like all the great nobles of the period, he rode and fought to perfection. But unlike most of the Grands, his scholastic education hadn’t been overlooked. Porthos pretended to understand the scraps of Latin that Aramis deployed, but Athos just smiled at them. Two or three times, to the great astonishment of his friends, he’d even caught Aramis in some fundamental error and restored a verb to its proper tense or a noun to its case. On top of all this, his integrity was irreproachable, in a century when men of war routinely trampled on the dictates of conscience and religion, lovers behaved without the least delicacy or decorum, and the poor roundly ignored God’s seventh commandment.

Demetrius the grammarian finding in the temple of Delphos a knot of philosophers set chatting together, said to them, “Either I am much deceived, or by your cheerful and pleasant countenances, you are engaged in no very deep discourse.” To which one of them, Heracleon the Megarean, replied: “ ’Tis for such as are puzzled about inquiring whether the future tense of the verb Ballo be spelt with a double L, or that hunt after the derivation of the comparatives Cheirou and Beltiou, and the superlatives Cheiriotou and Beliotou, to knit their brows whilst discoursing of their science; but as to philosophical discourses, they always divert and cheer up those that entertain them, and never deject them or make them sad.

The truth is that all humans are always seeing something, paying attention to something, learning something. Perhaps, we are learning every sort of sexual innuendo known to man by watching endless reruns of Friends. Perhaps, we are learning how to fit in socially and politically by spending hours and hours on social media. Perhaps we are paying attention, day and night, to what we don't have, wasting our time on Earth in envy, frustration, and discontent. We are paying attention to something. Maybe it isn't verb tenses, or the periodic table of elements, or the Great Books, but we are all being educated by our loves. Recognizing that maybe what we love is unworthy is the first step in being truly educated. What is worthy of this love I have? What is worthy of my time and attention? Let me tell you a secret. Education is free. It is simply a matter of opening your eyes and acknowledging the 'I don't know.

When I at last dozed, in sheer exhaustion of mind and body, it became a vast shadowy verb which I had to conjugate, Imperative mood, present tense: Do not thou go home, let him not go home, let us not go home, do not ye or you go home, let not them go home. Then, potentially: I may not and cannot go home; and I might not, could not, would not, and should not go home; until I felt that I was going distracted, and rolled over on the pillow, and looked at the staring rounds upon the wall again.

Kant was surely right that our minds "cleave the air" with concepts of substance, space, time, and causality. They are the substrate of our conscious experience. They are the semantic contents of the major elements of syntax: non, preposition, tense, verb. They give us the vocabulary, verbal and mental, with which we reason about the physical and social world. Because they are gadgets in the brain rather than readouts of reality, they present us with paradoxes when we push them to the frontiers of science, philosophy, and law. And as we shall see in the next chapter, they are a source of the metaphors by which we comprehend many other spheres of life.

We're in her bedroom,and she's helping me write an essay about my guniea pig for French class. She's wearing soccer shorts with a cashmere sweater, and even though it's silly-looking, it's endearingly Meredith-appropriate. She's also doing crunches. For fun. "Good,but that's present tense," she says. "You aren't feeding Captain Jack carrot sticks right now." "Oh. Right." I jot something down, but I'm not thinking about verbs. I'm trying to figure out how to casually bring up Etienne. "Read it to me again. Ooo,and do your funny voice! That faux-French one your ordered cafe creme in the other day, at that new place with St. Clair." My bad French accent wasn't on purpose, but I jump on the opening. "You know, there's something,um,I've been wondering." I'm conscious of the illuminated sign above my head, flashing the obvious-I! LOVE! ETIENNE!-but push ahead anyway. "Why are he and Ellie still together? I mean they hardly see each other anymore. Right?" Mer pauses, mid-crunch,and...I'm caught. She knows I'm in love with him, too. But then I see her struggling to reply, and I realize she's as trapped in the drama as I am. She didn't even notice my odd tone of voice. "Yeah." She lowers herself slwoly back to the floor. "But it's not that simple. They've been together forever. They're practically an old married couple. And besides,they're both really...cautious." "Cautious?" "Yeah.You know.St. Clair doesn't rock the boat. And Ellie's the same way. It took her ages to choose a university, and then she still picked one that's only a few neighborhoods away. I mean, Parsons is a prestigious school and everything,but she chose it because it was familiar.And now with St. Clair's mom,I think he's afraid to lose anyone else.Meanwhile,she's not gonna break up with him,not while his mom has cancer. Even if it isn't a healthy relationship anymore." I click the clicky-button on top of my pen. Clickclickclickclick. "So you think they're unhappy?" She sighs. "Not unhappy,but...not happy either. Happy enough,I guess. Does that make sense?" And it does.Which I hate. Clickclickclickclick. It means I can't say anything to him, because I'd be risking our friendship. I have to keep acting like nothing has changed,that I don't feel anything ore for him than I feel for Josh.

Erroneous plurals of nouns, as vallies or echos. Barbarous compound nouns, as viewpoint or upkeep. Want of correspondence in number between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the construction involved. Ambiguous use of pronouns. Erroneous case of pronouns, as whom for who, and vice versa, or phrases like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loyal, act promptly.” Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs. Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as “he was graduated from college,” or vice versa, as “he ingratiated with the tyrant.” Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest.” Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do otherwise,” or “He said the earth was round.” The split infinitive, as “to calmly glide.” The erroneous perfect infinitive, as “Last week I expected to have met you.” False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.” Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.” Misuse of prepositions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unworthy object,” or “The gold was divided between the five men.” The superfluous conjunction, as “I wish for you to do this.” Use of words in wrong senses, as “The book greatly intrigued me,” “Leave me take this,” “He was obsessed with the idea,” or “He is a meticulous writer.” Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as “a strange phenomena,” or “two stratas of clouds.” Use of false or unauthorized words, as burglarize or supremest. Errors of taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetorical awkwardness. Errors of spelling and punctuation, and confusion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its. Of all blunders, there is hardly one which might not be avoided through diligent study of simple textbooks on grammar and rhetoric, intelligent perusal of the best authors, and care and forethought in composition. Almost no excuse exists for their persistent occurrence, since the sources of correction are so numerous and so available.

Are you wondering what to write? Let’s start with some general statements that are useful each and every day. Then we’ll create statements that address specific emotional states like depression, anxiety, and feelings of stress. We’ll also create statements that pertain to specific situations such as sleep, relationships, parenting, job, school, health, skills, talents, and leisure activities. GENERAL STATEMENTS Here are some useful statements to write each and every day. Select two or three that resonate with you. You are not limited to these examples. You can write whatever you wish as long as it is a POSITIVE statement in the PRESENT TENSE that begins with ‘I AM’ and uses the PROGRESSIVE ‘ing’ form of the verb. At first, while learning the technique, you might want to use the statements suggested in this book. REMEMBER: Each POSITIVE, PRESENT TENSE, PROGRESSIVE statement is something you would like to be true. But you are writing it as if it already is true. In other words: I am writing positive statements. I am wanting them to be true. I am noticing that they are becoming true. I recommend writing at least two general statements every day. Here are some examples: I am embracing each and every day. I am enjoying today. I am living in the present moment. I am looking forward to today. I am having a productive day. I am staying focused. I am handling things well. I am taking things as they come. I am coping well with problems. I am focusing on the positives. I am moving smoothly through the day. I am confidently coping with challenges. I am noticing how well the day is going. I am feeling fully and deeply alive. Select two or three statements from the above list and write them here.

Here's the worst thing about death: the inherent racism of human language. While the living gorge themselves on the present indicative, all we can hope for are moldy leftovers of the past tense. If you even want the tiniest helping of a verb in the present tense, you must necessarily have the obscene badge of a beating heart pinned to your chest.

Credit” is the third-person singular conjugation of the present tense of the Latin verb credere, “to believe.” It’s the most exceptional and interesting thing in the financial world. Similar leaps of belief underlie every human transaction in life: Your wife might cheat on you, but you hope otherwise. The online store you paid may not ship you your goods, but you trust otherwise. Credit derivatives are just the explicit encapsulations of such beliefs, in financial and contractual form, for corporate entities. Unlike other financial securities, such as shares of IBM stock or oil futures, a credit derivative is not even some theoretical value of a tangible good. It’s the perceived value of a complete intangible, the perception of the probability of meeting some future obligation. People often asked me in the early days of my tech career how I had gone from Wall Street to ads technology. Such a person almost certainly knew nothing about either industry, or the answer would have been obvious. I did the same thing the whole time: putting a price on a human’s perception, be it of a General Motors bond or a pair of shoes coveted on Zappos. It’s the same difference either way; only the scale of the money pile changes.

He was polite; he was cool; he was enigmatic. He was every bit what they expected and wanted the storied Duke of Falconbridge to be, because it amused him to be so. In truth, his eyes were on the stairs. He waited with the patience of a cat near a mouse hole for Genevieve Eversea to arrive. He almost didn't recognize her when she did appear. Her dress was a glossy silk of midnight blue, cut very low, and the "sleeves"- really scraps of net- clung to her pale, flawless shoulders, as though she'd tumbled down through clouds to get here and brought a few sheds of sky with her. Her neck was long. Her collarbone had that smooth pristine temptation of a bank of new-fallen snow. It was interrupted only by a drop of a blue stone on a chain that pointed directly at quite confident cleavage, as if the owner knew full well it was splendid and was accustomed to exposing it. Her sleek dark hair was dressed up high and away from her face, and tiny diamanté sparks were scattered through it. Her face beneath it was revealed in delicate simplicity. A smooth, pale, high forehead, etched cheekbones. Elegant as Wedgwood, set off by that dark, dark hair and those vivid eyes. He stared. He wasn't precisely... nonplussed. Still, this particular vision of Genevieve Eversea required reconciling with the quiet girl in the morning dress, the moor pony with the determined gait. As though they were not quite the same thing, or were perhaps 'variations' of the same thing, like verb tenses. He felt a bit like a boy who needed to erase his morning lessons and begin again.

It is because the verb BE has a plain form which does not share its shape with any of the present tense forms that we need to distinguish the plain form as a distinct inflectional form. And if we do so for BE we should do so for all verbs.

At first it was awkward and embarrassing; he didn’t know how to conjugate verbs, so he just used the present tense and wildly waved his arms behind him to indicate that something had already happened.

Besides this, the grammatical forms and constructions in Russian are very peculiar, and present a great many strange irregularities. As an illustration of this we may take the future tense. The Russian verb has commonly a simple and a frequentative future. The latter is always regularly formed by means of an auxiliary with the infinitive, as in English, but the former is constructed in a variety of ways, for which no rule can be given, so that the simple future of each individual verb must be learned by a pure effort of memory. In many verbs it is formed by prefixing a preposition, but it is impossible to determine by rule which preposition should be used. Thus idu (I go) becomes poidu; pishu (I write) becomes napishu; pyu (I drink) becomes vuipyu, and so on.

When we compared the candidates’ résumés, Candidate A won hands-down. He had the “right stuff”—the adjectives about him just blew Candidate B out of the water. But that didn’t make him right for us. Had we looked for the past-tense verbs on their résumés, however, Candidate B would have won hands-down—because the résumé would have shown that he had taken the right courses in the schools of experience—including a field graduate seminar called “Scaling up process technology from the lab, through pilot scale, and then full scale.” He had wrestled with problems that the rest of us did not even know we were going to face. Or, in other words, he had the right processes to do the job.

There’s no such thing as “the passive tense.” Passive and active aren’t tenses, they’re modes of the verb. Each mode is useful and correct where appropriate. Good writers use both.

statement in 2 Cor 2:15–16 is a reminder that the gospel does not permit a position of neutrality. In this case, indifference is tantamount to rejection. And note Paul’s use of present tense verbs in verse 15: “are being saved” and “are perishing.” These indicate an ongoing process. Deciding for the gospel is not just a once-and-for-all decision. It is one that needs to be ratified every day.

The verb is present tense, “I do not know a man.” The passage does not say “I have pledged never to know a man” or “I will never know a man”; and (3) Even Roman Catholic theologian Ludwig Ott recognizes that the idea of a vow of virginity, made popular by Augustine (four centuries after the time of Christ), cannot be made to fit the context. “However, the subsequent espousals can hardly be reconciled with this” is his comment.[8] Ott is correct: the idea of a “married virgin” as Keating puts it is an oxymoron. Matthew speaks of the time “before they came together,” which is what would really make no sense if there was no intention of entering into a real marital relationship. The idea of a married virgin is simply out of harmony with the Bible’s teaching concerning the nature of marriage (let alone Jewish custom of the day). As Paul taught (1 Cor. 7), there is a marital debt involved (v. 3)[9] that would preclude the idea of a married virgin: the man’s body is not his own, but is his wife’s, and vice-versa. Sexual relations are completely natural in the married state, and, in fact, are assumed if a true marriage exists. If a person wishes to be a virgin, she should remain unmarried.[10] The idea of a virgin entering into an engagement with a man, even though she intends to remain celibate, is simply an attempt to make the biblical evidence support a doctrine created long after the apostles had finished writing Scripture.

Col 2:12), and (2) this event goes beyond the bounds of historical chronology and is an ever-present reality. Paul uses the verb in the perfect tense, which in Greek expresses the enduring result of a past action: I was crucified, and I still am. This corresponds to the concrete situation of believers. As we continue to †live on earth, Christ’s passion is being actualized in our lives, which in turn affects our participation in the life of the risen Christ.

Estados Unidos

As a rule of thumb, if a verb or phrase is about wishes, emotions, doubt, denial, recommendations, knowledge and understanding, then there's a strong possibility the Subjunctive will follow.

In the end, the tenses of the verbs settled into a common groove, the persons of the narrators, first and third (the latter with so many variants and identities), became one, and events thronged toward a day that began uncertainly and remained undecided, with a light gray film covering the sky.

What had she learned about verbs? In the past and future tenses, the verb came at the end. And in the present it followed the subject. Wherever she went it tailed her. She dragged it behind like a sack of stones.

Sometimes changes in language behaviour do not seem to be explainable in terms of a gradual build-up of fluency through practice. These changes have been described in terms of restructuring (McLaughlin 1990). They seem to be based on some qualitative change in the learner’s knowledge. Restructuring may account for what appear to be bursts of progress, when learners suddenly seem to ‘put it all together’, even though they have not had any new instruction or apparently relevant exposure to the language. It may also explain apparent backsliding, when a systematic aspect of a learner’s language incorporates too much or incorporates the wrong things. For example, as we saw in Chapter 2, when a learner finally masters the use of the regular -ed ending to show past tense, irregular verbs that had previously been used correctly may be affected. Thus, after months of saying ‘I saw a film’, the learner may say ‘I seed’ or even ‘I sawed’. Such overgeneralization errors are not based on practice of those specific items but rather on their integration into a general pattern.

Verbs also determine when something happens, in the present, in the past, or in the future. They set the tense of your tale.

begin with lexical items and show how they need to be grammatically modified to be communicatively effective.’ At around the same time, research using language corpora was highlighting the combinatory power, and ultimate learning potential, of grammar words (or functors), such as auxiliaries, determiners, prepositions, pronouns and conjunctions. As Sinclair and Renouf (1988: 155) pointed out, ‘English makes excessive use, e.g. through phrasal verbs, of its most frequent words, and so they are well worth learning.’ And they add, ‘verb tenses, for example, which are often the main organizing feature of a course, are combinations of some of the commonest words in the language.’ This suggests to me that there are two

word families (as opposed to individual words)? 4. What are the implications for course design and methodology of reversing the traditional order of grammar first, then vocabulary? 5. Widdowson talks about showing how words ‘need to be grammatically modified to be communicatively effective’. How would you go about doing this? 6. Frequency is commonly mentioned as a criterion for vocabulary selection. What other criteria are there? Is there a case for letting the learners decide which words to learn? 7. If verb tenses are simply combinations of high-frequency words, is there really such a thing as grammar at all (as distinct from vocabulary)? If not, what does this suggest

The true structure of the Welsh grammar will be revealed only when we look at sentences slightly more complicated than its basic VSO pattern. Welsh is no different from the rest of the world: it does involve an extra step, but even that isn't all that unusual. Welsh is like Shakespearean English on acid: the verb always - not just in questions - moves to the beginning. Alternatively, it can be viewed as taking the French grammar a step further. While the verb stops at tense in French, it moves further in Welsh to a position that traditional grammarians call the complementizer (don't ask).

The verb "cleanse" is in the present continual tense, referring to an ongoing activity. It is worth pondering whether our author is saying that cleansing happens in the course of body life, in the context of our communing with one another. Clearly, he does not see it as a purely private matter between the individual and Jesus: it is "we" who have communion and are cleansed by the blood.

Contrary to what I thought, being a college grad and fluent in English doesn’t make one a good English teacher. I was surprised to learn that all the stuff I didn’t know about the language was more than I knew—by a multiple of ten. I knew my nouns, verbs and adjectives. I could speak intelligently about the past, present and future tenses. No problem. But my students were asking me about aspects of English way out in the hinterlands of my understanding. Holy hell! When did English get more than three tenses? Turns out a world existed beyond verbs and nouns. A big world that, for me at the time, seemed as deep and incomprehensible as quantum physics. Tenses like the past perfect, the subjunctive, the pluperfect, the present perfect, the future perfect continuous. Often

Romans 12:1 issues this imperative to leaders: “Offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God.” The Greek aorist tense of the verb “offer” (which signifies a onetime act that is finished and done) is followed by thirty-six present-tense verbs (continuous action) that specify what should happen once we obey and offer. Two of those results are especially noteworthy here. First, “exert yourself to lead” (Romans 12:8 NEB). Barclay translates this phrase, “If called upon to supply leadership, do it with zeal.” Here is the summons to dive wholeheartedly into leadership, to serve with energy, to leave no room for sloth. Are we doing it?

I suggest that grammar reflects thinking, and thinking conditions grammar. We can only think in the way our language-structures permit us to think. And I note that neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga (2002) has this to say: “The right hemispheres of split-brain patients… consistently falter on grammatical tasks, such as changing verb tenses, constructing plurals, and indicating possessives.” The right hemisphere struggles with verb tenses. It is the hemisphere of the gods. Whatever deficits the right hemisphere has reflect the deficits of the voices of the gods. Confused grammar, as a transitional reality, means confused voices.

Nak stepped him through the Narashtovik alphabet, which was nearly identical to Mallish but lacking three letters, and the subtleties of its pronunciation, which unlike the Mallish stew was regular and orderly as the board of a game of cotters, and which Nak claimed was close enough to Gaskan to sound like no more than a regional accent. He made Dante write it out five times, then speak each letter five more. He drilled Dante on the verb conjugations of Narashtovik and its relation to modern Gaskan. He showed him the structure of its grammar in simple sentences, taught him a handful of words, the precise laws of how a verb cycled through the tenses of the present, the past, the future, the subjunctive. He bade Dante write out a dozen verbs through each of their forms and left on some monkish errand. Busywork, Dante thought, and far too much to take in at once. That Nak wanted him to learn through rote memorization struck him as an insult.

But now . . . he was not yet at the age, like his father, when life shifts to past tense, when what is becomes what was and all the other verbs defining your existence go slumping into the preterite, crusted with apophonic alternations (I sing calcifying into I sang), and you can do nothing but marvel or wince at the irredeemable, irreversible arc of it—not yet. On this November night he was fifty-four years old. By no means, he told himself, was he beyond the future tense. But he could feel the past tense gaining on him, like the cold seeping into his back and dusting his face. He licked it off his lips and stood up. He had work to do.

develop the 100 word vocabulary taught to the Lao tribesman to make the rudiments of combat conversation. A few nouns, some basic single tense verbs, names of weapons and directions made up the pidgin English. Like spice, flavor was added by whichever additional words the Special Forces teacher felt appropriate. The basic word denoting the reproductive act, and its many wondrous and colorful variations, was by far the most popular and common.

STRONG VERB a German verb whose stem changes its vowel to form the imperfect tense and the past participle. Its past participle is not formed by adding –t to the verb stem. Also known as irregular verbs. Compare with weak verb.

But a library is a gorgeous language that you will never speak fluently. You will try every day of your life. Order is a certain clumsy grammar, a mnemonic device. Order just means: try to use verbs. Consider the tense. The poetry will follow.

mood, present tense, third person plural, verb active to say.' 'Why verb active, Mary Anne?' 'Because it takes a pronoun after it in the objective case, Miss Peecher.

Am” is the linking verb that follows “I” in the present tense when I am no longer present, when I’m shattered.

Paul’s lesser-to-greater comparisons make another important point. Notice that the verbs associated with the new covenant ministry are in the future tense: will … be (v. 8), will abound (v. 9), will … be (v. 11). Paul thereby intimates the glory to be realized in eternal life. It is in the presence of God in heavenly glory that the fullness of the blessings of the new covenant will be enjoyed (see 2 Cor 5:1–10).

109.   What common English verb becomes its own past tense by rearranging its letters?

attention to the difference in tenses. The verbs believe and receive are in the present, but the verb shall have is in the future. The inspired writer is telling us something of the greatest importance by this seemingly minor difference in the grammar of the sentence.

Probably in no other language in the world is poetic license so freely permitted and indulged in as in Persian. The construction of sentences follows no rule; the order of words is just that which the individual poet chooses to adopt, and the idea of time — past, present, and future — is ignored in the use of tenses, that part of a verb being alone employed which rhymes the best.

Only in the present tense is the subject married to its verb. The action—all action, past and future—comes at the end. At the very end, when there is nothing left to do but act. ― Jill Alexander Essbaum, Hausfrau. (Random House; First Edition first Printing edition March 17, 2015)

Here then is the divinely given reason why the death penalty is passed on "all men": "all have sinned," or, as the margin and the Revised Version more accurately render it , "in whom all sinned." The apostle is not here saying that all men sinned personally, but representatively. The Greek verb for "sinned" is in the aorist tense, which always looks back to a past action which has terminated. The curse of the law falls on us not because we are sinful, but because we were federally guilty when our covenant head sinned.

Even in music, though, we found the same result. Music reviews that used more present-tense verbs were more persuasive.

Mandarin or Vietnamese, have little or no inflectional morphology: the concept of ‘plural’ in Mandarin for example has to be deduced from context (one dog, two dog, many dog and so on) and is not marked on the noun itself. Russian or Latin, by contrast, are examples of highly inflecting languages: both Latin and its daughter language, Portuguese, for example, have full verbal paradigms in which all persons in all tenses are marked by a suffix (compare English, which marks only third person singular in the present tense). In both Latin and Russian, nouns are additionally marked for case, indicating by means of a suffix their function within a sentence. English, which has lost most of its case marking except in pronouns (compare she as a subject or nominative form, and her as an accusative or object form), achieves this through word order (subjects tend to precede verbs, objects follow them), or by prepositions. In Russian, these endings vary according to the gender of the noun, and there is a separate plural form.

I can't get my verb tenses right. This person, my son, is going to leave my home and sleep somewhere else and have a whole life away from me. I know that, but right now I am looking at him and thinking, He is my child, and you're telling me that's about to be over? I don't understand how parenting will become past if I always love my children in the present.

In Italian papers, rumor often takes the place of fact. Unconfirmed and overblown stories are often printed as fact - one trick is the frequent use of the conditional verb tense which translates into English as “is said to”...

Still, this particular vision of Genevieve Eversea required reconciling with the quiet girl in the morning dress, the moor pony with the determined gait. As though they were not quite the same thing, or were perhaps variations of the same thing, like verb tenses.

little tougher for a complex past-tense construction in German, where the active verb in the sentence only shows up at the end!

The Russian verb is weak in tenses, strong in Aspects. [...] These aspects are in the very blood of the Slav. [...] These aspects I believe to be of profound psychological significance and this significance has not I think so far been fully understood.

the rolling hexameters of Virgil, the cleverly contrived odes of Horace and the epigrammatic prose of Tacitus, all exploiting the genius of a highly inflected language, a language where grammatical functions were expressed in the most highly condensed fashion, a single short suffix on a noun expressing case, number and sometimes gender, a single suffix on a verb expressing tense, aspect, mood, voice and the person and number of the subject.

Whatever language Death speaks is not ours; and most of us spend no time acquiring the complex grammar, in which every verb is irregular and only the past tense obtains, until it is too late

I only recently learned that my sister-in-law is employing what Hebrew scholars term the waw consecutive, an element of syntax upon which Hebrew stories are built. By prefixing a verb form with the letter waw in order to change tense, the writers of Hebrew Scripture move a story along by essentially saying, “And then, and then, and then.” “The composers of biblical prose,” wrote author and scholar Gregory Mobley, “appended the simplest conjunction, ‘and,’ to a line, gave it a little extra vocalization . . . doubled the initial consonant of the word to which the ‘and’ was attached, and voila: the Biblical Hebrew ‘and then.

Only 30 percent of English words are verbs, but in Potawatomi that proportion is 70 percent. Which means that 70 percent of the words have to be conjugated, and 70 percent have different tenses and cases to be mastered. Pages blurred and my eyes settled on a word—a verb, of course: “to be a Saturday.” Pfft! I threw down the book. Since when is Saturday a verb? Everyone knows it’s a noun. I grabbed the dictionary and flipped more pages and all kinds of things seemed to be verbs: “to be a hill,” “to be red,” “to be a long sandy stretch of beach,” and then my finger rested on wiikwegamaa: “to be a bay.” And then I swear I heard the zap of synapses firing. An electric current sizzled down my arm and through my finger, and practically scorched the page where that one word lay. In that moment I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore and hear it sift onto the sand. A bay is a noun only if water is dead. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive.

I know you're upset, of course you're upset," said Pu Sto's simulacrum. "You're grieving. Of course you are. I know how much you loved her." "Love her," Alma corrected, holding up one finger. "A little thing like dying doesn't cast that mighty verb into the past tense, you know.

A verb can specify the action or event, describe the trajectory of an action with respect to some reference spatial point, indicate whether an action is completed or ongoing, and select the semantic roles of the participants in an action. Verbs in many but not all languages have a tense, referring to past, present, or future. They express not only the intent but also the mood of the speaker. For example, ambulatory movement can be described by a variety of verbs that refer to different speeds, moods, intentions, directions, and patterns of walking—in essence allowing the listener to visualize the action.70