Quack E. Duck

Maybe it's the same underlying issue as is discussed in the accepted answer to this question? english.stackexchange.com/questions/500/… Because "had" is stressed/emphasized in "I had to leave," but unstressed/de-emphasized in the contraction "I'd," so they're non-substitutable (nohat explains it better though)

@JK2 About the verb/adjective usage of "taken": while looking for examples to cite, I found a very interesting article here: journals.openedition.org/lexis/4146. To quote its central point: "instability is inherent to the use of V‑ED adjectives as any variation" - meaning the two usages are difficult to differentiate and can be ambiguous.

@JK2 I’ll see what I can find tomorrow. Maybe I’ll end up convinced of the opposite viewpoint :D

@JK2 "It is taken care of" -> "taken" is an adjective; "It has been taken care of" -> "taken" is a verb (i.e. it's part of the perfect indicative passive construction has been taken)

So "I found Jane [very] nice" like your other example has the same structure as "I found Jane sitting" but "nice" seems to have a different role in the construction. It seems like you could add in to be in the first sentence but not the second: "I found Jane to be [very] nice" but not "I found Jane to be sitting." Also you can postmodify "sitting" with an adverb but can't do that with "nice": "I found Jane sitting comfortably"; not "I found Jane [very] nice (adv.)." So I agree that sitting does not have all the characteristics of an ordinary predicate adjective +1 and accepted :)

@alphabet I had to look up "complex-transitive" to see whether or not the adverb quite from the examples was a necessary constituent of it or not. Definition: "a complex transitive is a verb that requires both a direct object and another object or an object complement" (source: thoughtco.com/what-is-complex-transitive-verbs-1689888) so it looks like the direct object of found is Jane and the complement is sitting. If you get rid of quite, I think the sentence actually sounds fine: "I found Jane sitting." It means Jane was sitting when I found her.

I just voted to close the Meta question. Thank you again for all your help in troubleshooting the post: before our discussion I wasn't aware of the full scope of this topic. The IGE link you provided is a great resource and seems like it will be a valuable source of citations when answering questions in the future. I've bookmarked it :)

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. Would you agree with closing this question as "Opinion-Based," or do you think I should leave it open?

Having the perspective of a current professor of English such as yourself is very helpful -if you hadn't seen the "6 main tenses" that would suggest that either that model isn't prevalent everywhere, or else has been superseded. You have convinced me that maybe this is a poor choice for a canonical post topic. Should I close my question on Meta?

But now I'm back to square 1 -- there is no single agreed-on "basic" or "standard" model, and it could be misleading to present any single system as if it were one. But, to give any set of guidelines at all without doing so would require getting into a discussion and comparison of the different possible systems -- which is exactly what @gotube didn't think would be a good idea for this site. (See his comments in the original discussion under the post)

The entire subsection under the heading "Six tenses - other grammarians" is particularly informative. So, it appears the 6-tense model I used isn't new or nonstandard, but it is also far from being the universal model taught in schools or to ESL learners. It seems like I shouldn't make this kind of assertion in the CP given the lack of consensus.

And further on: "Another grammarian to develop the three times into six tenses was Lindley Murray. Continuing the Lowthian idea of prescriptive grammar, Murray was the author of English grammar: adapted to the different classes of learners, first published in 1795 and which became probably the most influential grammar book of the first half of the nineteenth century, in both Britain and North America."

But, the article goes on to describe the origins of the system which I referenced as "standard" in my CP proposal. Quoting from the linked source: "it is perhaps not surprising that many early grammarians went for a six-tense system: there is some variation in terminology, but the actual tenses don't vary. In this system, continuous forms are not counted as tenses, and are usually seen as variations of these six tenses."

of teaching tenses in English. I was actually dismayed to see that the number 12 there wasn't obtained by multiplying 6 tenses * 2 aspects, but instead 3 tenses * 4 aspects -- so even that is not without controversy!

Maybe relevant: looking at the IGE resource you linked, I noticed it's from the UK and wondered if maybe the "basic" tense system model has regional differences. So, I did a search for "6 tense system" to see if anything would turn up comparing US and UK usage. One of the first results was this: random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2014/01/… and while it doesn't address that question specifically, it does have an interesting discussion of the history (continued)

Hmm, I'm starting to see why there hasn't been a canonical post in such a long time... The version you learned seems like a great, clear way of presenting it, but it's different from the one I learned and have seen references to on English learners' online resources, and both are different from the model that they seem to prefer over on ELU. I'm not sure if it will be possible to write a "canonical" without at least mentioning that multiple models exist?

Thanks for all your help so far in improving this post, and for the references! It will be dinner time here soon so if I don't see your message right away, that's why. Did you see the original version of the suggested CP before the focus changed? I'm just wondering, because the second part (that got cut) might have been more along the lines of what you were thinking of

Over on ELU I see it discussed all the time, but I'm only familiar with the 6 tenses, and was very surprised to see there were alternatives when I got involved in this community! I will try to find those if they're online and not paywalled.

This is why I had originally wanted to do a compare-and-contrast of all the different models for tense and aspect - because no one can agree :D But, another contributor thought this would just confuse learners. --For your latest comment: Did you learn about the 2-tense model instead? I thought that was less common

But then, what happens to the 6 main tenses, and where does the number 12 come from?

That's odd, it just concatenated two of my comments. Oh, so you mean that "perfect" should be an aspect instead of a tense!

I will have to look that up and try to find a good, "conventional" source to cite. I hadn't realized before writing this how easy it is to take stuff for granted that might not actually be common practice! Any recommendations (do you have a specific resource in mind)?

Hi, how's it going? I was not aware that the Progressive and Continuous aspects weren't just different names for the same thing

In its current form, are there any parts of the post that seem unclear? Not enough examples/explanation? Maybe too much extraneous detail? Or do you consider it close to being ready (not sure what the official "review process" is for a suggested canonical post, or if there is one)

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. Sure, if you prefer

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. Removed it - that did streamline things. The post flows better without the frequent tangents about emphatic forms getting in the way!

Which was linked from the ngram results. So, I'm not the only one using it, but it seems as if it doesn't really compare with the "big" ones like "present perfect." Should I remove "emphatic" entirely from the post, or consign it to a footnote?

At least one confirmed source does use the term "emphatic tense": "When the verb to do is used as a helping verb and combined with another verb, it forms what is sometimes referred to as the emphatic tense. This tense is used for emphasis, in negative statements, and in questions." - Quote taken from a book called Alpha Teach Yourself Grammar & Style in 24 Hours google.com/books/edition/…

results: books.google.com/ngrams/… books.google.com/ngrams/… books.google.com/ngrams/… It looks like it's actually very uncommon - I'm surprised!

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. I'll give ngram a try and see what comes up. I thought it was a fairly common term, but may be mistaken. It certainly wouldn't do to include something idiosyncratic in a Canonical Post :D Thanks for pointing that out.

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. Where in the outline do you see that phrase? I just reread my post and couldn't find it.

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. Oops, if I used that phrase somewhere in my post, that was a mistake. I'm aware that "emphatic" isn't an "aspect," and I tried to make that clear in the explanation above the second table. I meant to only refer to "simple" and "continuous" as "aspects," but I'm not sure how to classify "emphatic" so I went with just calling it a "variant" of a tense. I'll take another look at the post and if I've written "emphatic aspect" anywhere, I'll fix that.

@gotube and MarcInManhattan: Edited again

go into the kind of depth you'd expect from EL&U.

I was trying to find some examples of questions which had gotten conflicting answers from different viewpoints to serve as a reference (for the original topic of this proposal), but of course as soon as I started looking for these specifically, I couldn't find any. These discussions ell.stackexchange.com/questions/254104/… and ell.stackexchange.com/questions/152884/… were the closest I could find, and do illustrate that there are some good questions and answers on this site that do

but do you think it would be worth keeping as a reference on the standard system? Or scrap the proposal entirely? Is a reference on exclusively the most common system for classifying tense and aspect really necessary, given that there are probably many online resources that already do so?

@gotube I'll revise the outline again tomorrow following your suggestions. So, completely eliminate the second section, and expand the first with a discussion of how "going to" works (plus clarify the usage of aspect vs. tense for the progressive)? That will leave the discussion of the 6 tenses, plus 2 aspects, and the emphatic forms, along with the clarification that "12 tenses" comes from conflating tense with aspect (6 * 2 = 12). I'm not sure that this CP will have much value for clarification if it doesn't address the full range of answers that learners' questions might get (contd)

"Getting into different models opens the floodgates for proponents of any model to insist theirs gets representation" - That could really inflate the post into something unmanageable! Should I only compare/contrast 6 tenses vs. 2, and get rid of any mention of additional systems? I'm not sure though whether it's possible to keep the "disambiguation" concept without mentioning the possibility of having multiple models. Do you have any ideas for how to avoid this issue?

@gotube I would consider that to be an alternate form of the future tense: how should I label it in the table? "Future Periphrastic," maybe, as I believe that is the term for a multi-part construction. I have also just edited the suggestion to cut all but the core concepts, and eliminated a lot of the examples and explanations.

In System 1, non-finite forms also have tense and aspect. In System 2, I believe they would say that they don't.

@MarcInManhattan #1 - The 6-tense, 3-variant model, which I have described (thoroughly?) in the first section. #2 - This I'm less clear on, but there seems to be a consensus from scholarly sources on a 2-tense system (how many aspects? I'm not sure).

@MarcInManhattan That is a good point, but what should get cut? Do you think the list of links is out of place in this kind of post?

@gotube I'm not clear on your last question? If you mean that I tend to answer questions from non-native speakers, and that I don't have a linguistics background, those are both true. Also, I intend this proposed CP to be mainly a resource for EFL learners. It would probably seem like stating the obvious to anyone who does have significant linguistics knowledge.

Primarily, if the community agrees that the idea would be helpful, I was just looking for suggestions for improvements to what's there, and was planning on "polishing" the rough draft (for one thing, I'll be fixing that numbering mistake in the superscripts! Also "10 = 12" has to go).

@gotube I don't intend it to be significantly longer than it is now: more like double (or not even that) and definitely not 10x! Mostly I was hoping someone more technically knowledgeable might help out with the last section. I was also considering adding a section on Sequence of Tenses as it relates to non-finite forms (like the infinitive) having their tense determined by their relation to the main verb's time reference (and also for the subjunctive)

@gotube "Why not continue the pattern we already have and create a separate CP about each individual tense and aspect?" -- I'm not sure if that was meant literally or rhetorically? If you're saying that what I was going for in the rough outline seems too broad or unfocused, then I will attempt to refine it to stick to a narrower scope (as defined in my first comment under yours). If that was an actual suggestion, wow that would be a big project! But, I'll volunteer to start on one (which one?), although I doubt it will compare to the existing one on the Perfect

@gotube This isn't intended to overlap with CP#2 at all, except as far as the perfect is a tense (or aspect, depending on your perspective) and so should be included in the tables. It's more of a meta-discussion I guess: it isn't about a tense or aspect so much as about ways of considering tense and aspect

@gotube The primary intent behind this post was to have a "disambiguation" page that would give an overview of each of the (two?) main models for understanding tense and aspect. In order to avoid confusion from askers getting answers which appear to contradict each other - this would clarify that there are different approaches with different pros and cons. Following the model of the CP about the Perfect (which I have read; it's a truly impressive project by StoneyB :D), I thought it might be helpful to also include a list of good Qs and As for each of the different tenses.

Also currently unsure as to whether I should add a section on Sequence under the Non-Finite Forms section. Any opinions on whether this would be relevant here, or an unnecessary tangent? By "sequence," I'm referring to the rule for determining the non-finite form's tense relative to the main verb.

I'll keep on adding links to the Potentially Helpful Questions section as I find them. The intent is to have a gallery of good reference Q/A pairs, like the one in Part 5 of StoneyB's canonical post here: ell.stackexchange.com/questions/13255/…