A Brief History of Tense

The standard TEFL model - twelve tenses (or forms)

In EFL and ESL, we usually talk of twelve tenses or forms, each being a combination of a time and an aspect. Although few EFl / ESL writers would talk of a twelve tense system, that's what it really amounts to.

But writers on grammar haven't always seen it like that (and some don't today). As so many old grammar books are available on the web these days, whether at Project Gutenberg, Google Books or Archive.org, I thought it might be interesting to have a look at how English tenses have been treated over the centuries, and have a look at some old grammar books at the same time.

Archive.org deserves a special mention. Their books are freely available in several formats; the online facsimile versions (which I link to in the text) are very easy to read through and find things in, but they also have other formats for downloading, for example for e-readers.

The twelve tense system in English - an overview

Not everyone agrees on what comprises a tense. It is common to talk about present, past and future tenses, but some people think a tense must involve inflection (or morphological change), that is a change in the form of the verb itself, as in Latin and many European languages, so they recognise only two tenses - past and present. On the other hand, one early grammar book talked of six tenses.

In EFL/ESL we usually work on the basis that a tense combines a time (present, past or future) with an aspect (simple, continuous, perfect simple or perfect continuous). This gives us twelve active tenses. In theory we could also have twelve passive tenses, but in practice, only eight are used.

Although I will be talking a bit about individual tenses, my main aim here is to show how, in this way of looking at things, all twelve tenses fit into a neat, easy to understand scheme.