Verb groups

One of the most important uses of verb groups is to communicate important information about when an action took place, is taking place, or will take place.

We call this tense, or timing. There are two aspects to tense, and we'll look at each one separately.

First we'll look at what we think of as simple tenses.

Compare these two snippets. Which one talks about the present and which one the past? How do you know?

The first snippet is in the past and the second is the present. We know this because each verb has a flavour we call tense which helps us understand when an event took place.

Note that tense doesn't tell us precise clock time ("in 15 minutes") or calendar time ("last week").

Tense is more general, telling us whether something happens in the past, present or future.

You might notice that blew and blows are single-verb actions: one verb on its own can tell us whether an event happened in the past or present.

But what happens when we need to talk about the future?

We don't have a future tense verb for blow. Instead we use another word to create a verb group: will blow. Will is used to show future tense.

And that's not all. Here's another way we can show future tense.

We can use is going to show something will happen in the future instead of will. They are almost interchangeable.

These extra words function as what we call tense helpers. They help communicate when an action took place.