THE VERB TO BE AND THE TENSES

THE VERB TO BE AND THE TENSES

Verb to be is a verb that is used to modify (qualify) other verb, an adjective, or an adverb.  The tenses is any of the inflected forms of a verb that indicate the time and continuance or completion of the action or state.  There are three basic forms of tenses: present, past and future (will be discussed in detail in next lecture).

Subject	Present	Past	Future	Present Perfect	Past Perfect
I	am	Was	will be	have been	had been
We	are	Were	will be	have been	had been
You	are	Were	will be	have been	had been
They	are	Were	will be	have been	had been
He	is	Was	will be	has been	had been
She	is	Was	will be	has been	has been
It	is	Was	will be	has been	had been

In the present tense there are three kinds of verb to be: am, are, and is.

·  am is used for the singular first person (I).

·  are is used for the plural first person (We), singular and plural second person (You), and plural third person (They).

·  is used for the singular third person (He or She), and for an object (It).

In the past tense there two kinds of verb to be:  was and were.

·  was is used for the singular first person (I) and singular third person (He or She) and for an object (It).

·  were is used for the plural first person (We), plural second person (You), and plural third person (They).

In the future tense, a modal verb (will) precedes the verb be for all the subjects.  In present perfect tense, a helping verb (have or has) precedes the word been (third form of the verb be).  Have is used for the subject I, You, We,  and They, whereas Has is used for the subject He, She, and It.  Meanwhile, for the past perfect tense, all the subjects use the past form of the helping verb (had) followed by word been (third form of the verb be).

Examples:

1.  I am a first year student of Agricultural Faculty, University of Jambi.

2. Hugo will be happy because the government will provide him with a small business loan next month...

3.  Harison had been an agricultural extension officer since he graduated from UNJA in 1980.

Sentence transformation

An affirmative sentence employing verb to be can be transformed into a negative or interrogative sentence.  To transform the sentence into a negative form, we simply add a negation word NOT after the verb to be.  Whereas to transform the sentence into an affirmative, we simply put the verb to be at the beginning of the sentence before the subject.

Examples:

1.   She was in the meeting last night.

      She was not in the meeting last night.

                Was she in the meeting last night?