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Kane159 Posted 16 years ago
Grammar

Usage of tenses

Hi,
I am wondering whether I could replace the continuous tense with simple in the following case.

"My whole life I've been taking people apart - never thought I'd be putting one (-> put ) back together."

In my opinion,the usage of the continuous tense is because it is not finished,right? He is in the process of doing it,correct?

Thank you so much in advance!
  

Top answer

Hi. "In my opinion,the usage of the continuous tense is because it is not finished,right? " It is correct, although depending on the context it might also mean that you were going to do it, because there is a future arrangement to do it.

— Tarirotari

  • Hi.
  • "In my opinion,the usage of the continuous tense is because it is not finished,right?
  • " It is correct, although depending on the context it might also mean that you were going to do it, because there is a future arrangement to do it.
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3 Answers
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Hi.
"In my opinion,the usage of the continuous tense is because it is not finished,right? He is in the process of doing it, correct?" It is correct, although depending on the context it might also mean that you were going to do it, because there is a future arrangement to do it.
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Thank you.[Y]
It gets me that I always hesitate about whether to use the simple or the continuous tense when talking about actions in the future
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kane159replace the continuous tense with simple
You can do that, but it would be better to keep the parallelism with taking earlier in the sentence.

CJ
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