◊ GRAMMAR
Tenses are the different verb forms and verb groups that indicate roughly what time you are referring to.
Simple tenses are used to refer to situations, habitual actions, and single completed actions.
I like him very much.
He always gives both points of view.
He walked out of the kitchen.
Continuous tenses are used when talking about temporary situations at a particular point in time.
Inflation is rising.
We believed we were fighting for a good cause.
Some verbs are not used in continuous tenses. For information about this, see section on stative verbs in entry at ↑
Perfect tenses are used when relating an action or situation to the present or to a moment in the past.
Football has become international.
She did not know how long she had been lying there.
Passive tenses are used when the subject of a clause is the person or thing affected by an action. Passive tenses are formed by using an appropriate tense of 'be' and the past participle of the main verb.
The earth is baked by the sun into a hard, brittle layer.
They had been taught to be critical.
For more information on the uses of tenses, see entries at ↑
◊ present and past tenses
The following table shows how to form present and past tenses.
◊ future tenses
There are several ways of referring to the future in English. The commonest way is to use the modal 'will' or 'shall'. See entry at ↑
The following table shows future tenses.
For other ways of referring to the future, see entry at ↑