What are the Tenses of Modal Verbs?

Question

Hey all, I'm able to determine whether a certain modal verb phrase is in past, present or future tense. However, how can I determine what the exact tense (out of the total of English 12 tenses) of a modal verb is?

E.g. Recycling should be mandatory.

I know that the above sentence is in Present tense. But how do I know if it's in Present Simple, Present Perfect, Present Continuous or Present Perfect Continuous?

E.g. If I were with you, this would have never happened.

I know that the above sentence is a Past conditional. But how do I know if it's in Past Simple, Past Perfect, Past Continuous or Past Perfect Continuous?

Please help me in understanding this concept. Thank you!

CalifJim · Accepted Answer

Shay Singhhow can I determine what the exact tense of a modal verb is?

Modal verbs don't actually have tense in the same way that the other verbs have tense. For example, when the verb phrase in a clause has can, could, will, would, may, must, ..., it's a modal "tense" (or "construction"). If it's could have, will have, would have, may have, ..., it's a modal perfect "tense" (or "construction"). There are no other possibilities.

By convention, the modal tense with 'will' is called the future tense, but there are no generally accepted alternate names for the other modal constructions.

If you look at the forms of the words, you'll see that most modal verbs form pairs as non-past and past: can, could; will, would; shall, should; may, might. However, there have been so many changes in usage throughout history that these are no longer consistently used to represent non-past and past situations, so you can't really reliably label every verb phrase containing 'could', to take an example, as "past tense".

CJ

BillJ · Answer

Shay SinghHowever, how can I determine what the exact tense (out of the total of English 12 tenses) of a modal verb is?

I think that is a potentially misleading way of putting things. It is better to say that English has two tense systems: an inflectional system contrasting preterite and present, and an independent analytic tense system contrasting perfect and non-perfect, where non-perfect is not a tense but the absence of perfect tense. The perfect tense can combine with preterite and present tense but can also occur in clauses without inflectional tense.

Preterite and perfect are both instances of the more general tense 'past'. Preterite is the primary (inflectional) past tense, while perfect is the secondary (analytic) past tense.

Note that 'progressive' is not a tense, but an aspect. And 'conditional is not a tense either but a kind of 'construction' containing an adjunct introduced by "if".

As far as the tense of the modal auxiliary verbs is concerned, the answer is that it depends on how syntactically accurate you want to be.

Syntactically, "could", "might", "would", and "should" are the preterite (past) forms of "can, "may", "will" and "shall", respectively. That this is true is evident from the fact that "could" and "would", for example, are undoubtedly the preterite counterparts of "can" and "will" since they are the forms required in backshift.

Shay SinghE.g. Recycling should be mandatory. I know that the above sentence is in Present tense.

No: as I have just explained, syntactically "should" is a preterite form, so this sentence is preterite (past) tense. Semantically, it refers to present (or future) time.

Shay SinghIf I were with you, this would have never happened.I know that the above sentence is a Past conditional. But how do I know if it's in Past Simple, Past Perfect, Past Continuous or Past Perfect Continuous?

The matrix verb is the preterite modal "would", so it follows that the sentence must be preterite (past) tense. "Have never happened" is a subordinate clause, perfect tense, functioning as complement of "would".

What are the Tenses of Modal Verbs?

Top answer

Get the Weekly English Kit 📬

Related Questions