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Anonymous Posted 10 years ago
Grammar
Two Tenses in a Sentence
I don't know what tense a sentence is defined as being if there are two different verb tenses in each one for example:
"While walking home, I dropped my pen".
From what I can see "dropped my pen" is Simple past and "walking home" is Present continuous, so my question is what is the general tense of the sentence?
I add a few more examples:
"I cannot attend the meeting as I will be having friends over for dinner tonight".
"When I arrived at the petrol station, I realised I had left my credit card at home".
"The car broke down because I was driving recklessly" .
"While walking home, I dropped my pen".
From what I can see "dropped my pen" is Simple past and "walking home" is Present continuous, so my question is what is the general tense of the sentence?
I add a few more examples:
"I cannot attend the meeting as I will be having friends over for dinner tonight".
"When I arrived at the petrol station, I realised I had left my credit card at home".
"The car broke down because I was driving recklessly" .
Top answer
Only verbs have tenses, not sentences, though if all the verbs in a sentence are in the same tense we may loosely refer to it as a, for example, past-tense sentence. From what I can see "dropped my pen" is Simple past and "walking home" is Present continuous '... walking home' is not present continuous.
- Only verbs have tenses, not sentences, though if all the verbs in a sentence are in the same tense we may loosely refer to it as a, for example, past-tense sentence.
- From what I can see "dropped my pen" is Simple past and "walking home" is Present continuous '...
- walking home' is not present continuous.
- It is a participle phrase..
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2 Answers
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Only verbs have tenses, not sentences, though if all the verbs in a sentence are in the same tense we may loosely refer to it as a, for example, past-tense sentence.
Anonymous"While walking home, I dropped my pen".From what I can see "dropped my pen" is Simple past and "walking home" is Present continuous'... walking home' is not present continuous. It is a par
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"While walking home, I dropped my pen".
It means this:
"While I was walking home, I dropped my pen".
The present participle by itself is not inflected for tense. It gets its tense from the helping verb.
When the helping verb is omitted, the present participle indicates an action that happens at the same time as the action of the main verb.
Some othe
It means this:
"While I was walking home, I dropped my pen".
The present participle by itself is not inflected for tense. It gets its tense from the helping verb.
When the helping verb is omitted, the present participle indicates an action that happens at the same time as the action of the main verb.
Some othe
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