By Chris DiStasio

Verb tenses (and aspects) are often represented as following technically consistent patterns. For instance, simple past tense is commonly represented in ESL classes as a tense that should be used when speaking about completed past events and then maintained within the same frame of past events. Furthermore, verb tenses are often covered in decontextualized grammar exercises, which focus on how a particular tense works outside of a wider context of use that could include that particular instance. However, a look at a transcript sample from a typical radio talk show, which involves relatively free discourse, illustrates that verb tense use is more complicated in an actual conversation than these representations allow for. Indeed, the sample shows that verb tenses tend NOT to be used consistently throughout conversational narrative discourse.

In the sample in question, from a Larry King radio talk show, tenses (and aspects) change several times within a short series of sentences, even when a particular situation is being described (Cable News, 2001). For example:

At least two reference grammar texts, Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1998) and Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Starvik (1985), actually refer to this inconsistency of verb tenses/aspects. As Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1998) write, "Tense shifts in authentic oral narrative are extremely complex" (p. 167). Quirk et al. (1985) address alternation of tenses in narrative as being based on specific semantic moves on the speaker’s part. As Quirk et al. (1985) write, "The narrative will weave backwards and forwards, a mixture of tenses and aspects, of finite and nonfinite clauses enabling the narrator to depart from the linear sequence of historical order so as both to vary the presentation and to achieve different (eg. dramatic) effects" (p. 1455).

For instance, in one line of the sample a change from simple past to present perfect creates an effect that would have been different if simple past had continued being used. When the speaker uses present perfect in the phrase "the opposite has taken place" – after using simple past previously with "We met with the president when he first came in office, he said it would be federalism with granting rights to the states, that the states would be empowered more" – the speaker emphasizes in a way simple past would not have that promises made do not reflect the reality of the present. (Cable News, 2001, ¶97).

Because verb tenses (and aspects) change within actual spoken narrative, which results in different effects, perhaps speaker intent is the best overall guide to which verb tense is best to use in a given conversational situation. Perhaps, too, decontextualized grammar exercises do not represent grammar completely enough, in terms of the wider context of actual use. Perhaps, the technically inconsistent way verb tenses are used in actual narrative discourse should be reflected in the way verb tenses are presented in the second language classroom.

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