Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The simple present or present simple is a form that combines present tense with "simple" (neither perfect nor progressive) aspect. In the indicative mood it consists of the base form of the verb, or the -s form when the subject is third-person singular (the verb be uses the forms am, is, are).
The simple present is the most commonly used verb form in English, accounting for more than half of verbs in spoken English. [1] It is called "simple" because its basic form consists of a single word (like write or writes), in contrast with other present tense forms such as the present progressive (is writing) and present perfect (has written).
Many adjectives derive from present participles (e.g., interesting, willing, & amazing) or past participles (e.g., tired, involved, & concerned). These can often be distinguished from verbs by their ability to be modified by very (e.g., very tired but not *very based on it) or appear after become as predicative complements.
Most verbs have three or four inflected forms in addition to the base form: a third-person singular present tense form in -(e)s (writes, botches), a present participle and gerund form in -ing (writing), a past tense (wrote), and – though often identical to the past tense form – a past participle (written).
In English, most words are uninflected, while the inflected endings that exist are mostly ambiguous: -ed may mark a verbal past tense, a participle or a fully adjectival form; -s may mark a plural noun, a possessive noun, or a present-tense verb form; -ing may mark a participle, gerund, or pure adjective or noun.
Additionally, the present tense can be used to talk about either the present or the past and which one it implies is determined by context. For instance, "We went to the mall [yesterday]. James buys a new bike", where without the context (yesterday) the action of buying would take place in the present but in this very sentence, it occurs in the ...
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
There are four simple tenses: the present, past, future, and conditional. The present tense can be formed from the infinitive by removing the final -r. It covers the simple and continuous present tenses in English. The verbs esser 'to be', haber 'to have', and vader 'to go' normally take the short forms es, ha, and va rather than esse, habe ...