Secondary III • 3yr.
Hello! My teacher told us about having to adjust our verb tenses to be the same or close to it, but I'm not sure I understood... Can you help me? Thank you.
Hello! My teacher told us about having to adjust our verb tenses to be the same or close to it, but I'm not sure I understood... Can you help me? Thank you.
Explanation from Alloprof
This Explanation was submitted by a member of the Alloprof team.
Hello,
Thank you for your question!
There are two ways to harmonize verb tenses, depending on what we are referring to:
First, there is temporal coherence, which is the judicious use of verb tenses according to the overall organization of the text in order to ensure the internal logic of the discourse. Specifically, it is the harmonization of tenses and verbal modes within the same text.
Secondly, it is possible that the choice of verb tenses does not depend on the overall meaning of the text, but about the grammatical construction of the sentence. This is when we talk about tense concordance, which is governed by precise grammatical rules.
The tense concordance must respect certain grammatical rules according to the tense relation between the basic sentence, also called principal, and the subordinate:
The verb in the base sentence can be in the present, past, future, or conditional tense.
The action or fact presented in the subordinate can be prioritized (before), simultaneous (at the same time) or posterior (after) to the action or fact presented in the base sentence.
The tense of the subordinate will adjust to that of the base sentence.
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