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What tense is used?
Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 10:03 am
by susie
The email will be sent out tomorrow.
Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 4:27 pm
by fluffyhamster
Many teachers, and some relatively informal books, would call that the "future passive" tense, and the term has admittedly become a reasonably convenient shorthand. It is however technically-speaking not really correct, but I hesitate to bore you with the details because I am not sure you'll be up for reading them. (Briefly though, modal verbs aren't a true/full part of the verb inflections of English, so one should really call such a construction as 'The email
will be sent [out] tomorrow' a "modalized passive" or somesuch).
Anyway, here are some previous and more detailed related discussions if you are interested:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 3934#43934
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic ... 206#899206
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 3962#43962
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic ... 280#714280
What part of speech is 'on time' in these sentences?
Posted: Fri May 27, 2011 7:06 am
by susie
Please be on time.
The students came to class on time.
She is on time.
Posted: Fri May 27, 2011 9:39 am
by fluffyhamster
I'm not inclined to just keep on pumping out answers, Susie, especially for no thanks at all. And for all I know you could be a trainee teacher (e.g. doing a CELTA) who should really be learning at least some of this stuff for yourself! (Mind you, if you do have a try and really are stumped, come back and plead a little and I suppose I'll relent and tell you the answers
).
Posted: Sat May 28, 2011 7:03 pm
by fluffyhamster
Aww, alright, here are the answers then:
Please be on time = Not so much to do with tense as
mood, this is the
IMPERATIVE. (Look up 'mood', then 'imperative', then finally 'indicative' in the following grammar glossary:
http://folk.uio.no/hhasselg/terms.html . Note especially the following sentences from the latter two entries respectively:
The imperative verb form (identical to the base form of the verb) is finite, although it does not vary for tense, aspect, or person/number. And:
The indicative verb form differs from the others [= other moods - FH]
in varying for tense and aspect, and in showing grammatical concord with the subject in the present tense).
The students came to class on time = Past tense (of the verb 'come').
She is on time = Present tense (of the verb 'be', inflected/in the form appropriate for the 3rd person singular subject).