3.2 The Magic of Participles and Aspects: How to Use it (in the Woods)

Teachers urge you to learn from the past to improve the present and maximize benefits. But have you met someone who lived in the World of Now? Social scientists suggest that focusing on today’s priorities is more satisfying than dwelling on yesterday’s tragedies. With a positive mindset, strong prospects should help you be consistent and mature. But what if you slip deep into the woods? The stirring air pauses with chirping birds in the morning, and you may wonder about your purpose of life. This brings us to Aspects being more than a description of verbs to time and space. In the Aspect universe, it formulates our way of thinking as if the event is completed or incomplete or even continuing to present days. From previous discussions, we knew the verb changed in accordance with the completion of the tasks in time aspect. What if we enhance the complexity of tenses to describe a state of being, a complete and/or an incomplete action? The answer is straightforward: use Participles in your sentence.

1)        Gerund, aka. Present Participle

We must use Gerund in the Continuous Aspect which the fundamental form of participle is indeed in the present form. While sleeping comfortably in your bed, you should have known everything in a continuous aspect were formulated with -be plus a gerund verb, meaning by adding +ing behind the auxiliary verb. For example, if it is a present ongoing task now, you may say “I am reading the textbook for tomorrow’s lecture.” If you refer to something in the past like an hour, you may say “I was reading the textbook for tomorrow’s lecture an hour ago (time aspect).” In a more complex case, you may have a Perfect aspect but with a Present Participle. For example, you may restrict your presentation to a contained scene like “After today’s breakfast (time aspect), I have been reading the textbook for tomorrow's lecture.” Now we study the allocation of time aspects in the simple past and later in the Perfect past. In what scenario that you need to be Present/Past Perfect Continuous form, aka, adding -have and -be as the auxiliary verb with a gerund? The answer stays within the aspect of time. If it was continued in the past, you use continued past; if it happens currently, then be consistent to continue; if somethings had started in the past but keep doing so to your current standing, you need to be in Present/Past Perfect Continuous form, and the conjugation of auxiliary verb changes in -have, not the following or the second one -be.

Gerunds, especially describing feelings and ideas, can be categorizes as nouns. They refer to the state of beings, feelings, and circumstances. At that moment, your instance feeling is spontaneous towards your current space. For example, I met a decent-looking man at the corner of a bar dressed up gently, and he gave me a razor-sharp glance of intimacy. You reply to him, “You look interesting.” >> “He was interested in you.” When you use Gerund to describe your state of feeling, there exists another side of the story: a desire for recognizing more information of the act. The story’s tragedy moves into passive tense. The position of the subject and object and the verb can impact the use of adjectives in multiple dimensions. Other than a simple foreshadowing of an action, you can control the modification process to show your feelings and behind-the-scenes recognition.

2)        The Perfect Aspects

The Perfect Aspects does not equal to perpetrating an abstracted thought from the finest angle, instead it is all about the time reference projected in your sentence. Alternatively called the Perfect tense, it recalls a completed past backward from a reference point in time. In this case, time reference points are relevant. So, we are connecting two dots: the action’s time reference and the present time mattered from the past or future. Previously, we discussed the present perfect continuous tense, and you can substitute the past perfect continuous aspect accordingly. The Perfect Aspects should then divide into two parts: the auxiliary verb of -have and the regular/irregular verb change into participles which talks about something completed. Out of the auxiliary verb -have, Present Perfect tense gives us the framework to move from the past to current time reference; Past Perfect tense allows us to reference a finished past event by standing on today’s ground.

Let me show you some examples. In the Present Perfect tense, we use -have/-has plus a past participle: -ed for regular verb or such as (write to written) changing to irregular for certain verb. Imagine we are at the peak of the mountain and looking back to the exhausting progress we made. “We have gone through small trails and creeks, so we are now at the peak breathing fresh air.” In this compound sentence, we have a completed past action and then an explanation to current period together in the same sentence. You can modify it into question form: “Have you ever been to China?” then “Yes, I have been to China”. Similarly, we use -had plus a past participle that is -ed for regular verb or any irregular verb. “I had forgotten to send you the file last night, but I felt guilty when I finally remembered it this morning.” We have first forgotten something in the distanced past, and on the next day, you finally woke up to fix it. We had two pasts, one that was further down the line as something had been completed, and a second one was connected from the past to present. These are examples of the Perfect Aspects.

3)        The Future Aspects

As you stand in front of a mirror in the morning, you swear and confront for a better day. When you are moving towards the future aspect, you are in fact making ambiguous promises and plans for your future period. Unlike in the Perfect Aspects, drawing future time reference is rather straightforward. In the base form, we use -will/ -shall such as “we will leave for school at 6:30am tomorrow.”  Likewise in the future perfect continuous form, we have a future reference -will have plus a past participle that draws the connection between the present time and to-be-completed events. “By 8:00pm this evening, I will have finished all my homework for the day.” And of course, there are endless combinations to describe future aspects. If your present references are related to your future event, you can use different methods to connect both items in the open space.

4)        Summary

English can be fun and dramatic. Regarding to the Participles and Aspects, we learned how our stands varied throughout the interpretation of time. We knew by heart now if something is ongoing in a continuous dimension, we need to use Gerund respectively along with our settings. You could bring the past concern into your continuous future; we used past/present perfect continuous tense. In the feeling aspect, we turned Gerund into passive for illustrating the result of one’s deception. On Perfect Aspects, we discussed in what time reference of our past projected into our present or a certain but closed upon past period. And we briefly discussed about the Future Aspects of planning, wishes, and promises.

If you understand the position of yourself in the wood, you will not get lost. You will eventually draw a pathway from your past and find out a path to your future- learning English usage from different aspects.

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