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Summaries of the narratives (plots) of works of fiction are conventionally presented using the present tense, rather than the past tense. At any particular point of the story, as it unfolds, there is a now and so a past and a future, so whether some event mentioned in the story is past, present, or future, changes as the story progresses.
A number of multi-word constructions exist to express the combinations of present tense with the basic form of the present tense is called the simple present; there are also constructions known as the present progressive (or present continuous) (e.g. am writing), the present perfect (e.g. have written), and the present perfect progressive (e.g ...
It is formed with the present tense of the auxiliary have (namely have or has) and the past participle of the main verb. The choice of present perfect or past tense depends on the frame of reference (period or point in time) in which the event is conceived as occurring. If the frame of reference extends to the present time, the present perfect ...
The first of these sentences is a basic zero conditional with both clauses in the present tense. The fourth is an example of the use of will in a condition clause [4] (for more such cases, see below). The use of verb tenses, moods and aspects in the parts of such sentences follows general principles, as described in Uses of English verb forms.
This is followed by the simple past tense , and then the past participle. If there are irregular present tense forms (see below), these are given in parentheses after the infinitive. (The present participle and gerund forms of verbs, ending in -ing, are always regular. In English, these are used as verbs, adjectives, and nouns.)
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).
English also has a present perfect continuous (or present perfect progressive) form, which combines present tense with both perfect aspect and continuous (progressive) aspect: "I have been eating". The action is not necessarily complete; and the same is true of certain uses of the basic present perfect when the verb expresses a state or a ...
Exercises in Style (French: Exercices de style), written by Raymond Queneau, is a collection of 99 retellings of the same story, each in a different style.In each, the narrator gets on the "S" bus (now no. 84), witnesses an altercation between a man (a zazou) with a long neck and funny hat and another passenger, and then sees the same person two hours later at the Gare St-Lazare getting advice ...