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Dave Phillips Posted 15 years ago
Linguistics Studies

Tenses

I think that most people agree that there is two tenses; present and non-present in English. Passive is a voice not a tense. So what are simple/continuous (progressive) perfect etc described as? Is it purely a verb form?
  

Top answer

g. "wrote" has the "past tense" meaning and the "active voice" meaning, "will be written" has the "future tense" meaning and the "passive voice" meaning. We cannot separate them.

— Vchekh

  • g.
  • "wrote" has the "past tense" meaning and the "active voice" meaning, "will be written" has the "future tense" meaning and the "passive voice" meaning.
  • We cannot separate them.
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3 Answers
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Any finite verb form has both "tense" and "voice" grammatical components, e.g. "wrote" has the "past tense" meaning and the "active voice" meaning, "will be written" has the "future tense" meaning and the "passive voice" meaning. We cannot separate them.
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Dave PhillipsI think that most people agree that there is two tenses; present and non-present in English.
I would say that there are two tenses: past and non-past.

Active and passive are 'voices'.

The use of -ing is 'continuous aspect' (or 'progressive aspect'); the use of has, have, had with past participles is 'perfect aspect'.
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