general

According to one prevalent account, the English tense system has only two basic times, present and past. No primitive future tense exists in English; the futurity of an event is expressed through the use of the auxiliary verbs "will" and "shall", by use of a present form, as in "tomorrow we go to Newark", or by some other means. Present and past, in contrast, can be expressed using direct modifications of the verb, which may be modified further by the progressive aspect (also called the continuous aspect), the perfect aspect (also called the completed aspect), or both. Each tense is named according to its combination of aspects and time. These two aspects are also referred to as BE + ING (for the first) and as HAVE +EN (for the second). Although a little unwieldy, such tags allow us to avoid the suggestion that uses of the aspect BE + ING always have a "progressive" or "continuous" meaning, which they do not.

For the present tense:

• Present Simple (not progressive/continuous, not perfect; simple): "I eat"
• Present Progressive (progressive, not perfect): "I am eating"
• Present Perfect (not progressive, perfect): "I have eaten"
• Present Perfect Progressive (progressive, perfect): "I have been eating"

For the past tense:

• Past Simple (not progressive/continuous, not perfect; simple): "I ate"
• Past Progressive (progressive, not perfect): "I was eating"
• Past Perfect (not progressive, perfect): "I had eaten"
• Past Perfect Progressive (progressive, perfect): "I had been eating"

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