Tenses: Please explain grammatical tenses, their names and uses [closed]

Solution 1:

Those aren’t tenses. English has only two morphological inflections related to time, the present tense and the preterite tense. For everything else including the future, probability, demands, and all the rest we use a modal auxiliary.

Things like perfect and progressive are merely aspects, not tenses in English. People are confusing Latin grammar with English. Latin had tenses like the future, the perfect, the imperfect, and the pluperfect as inflections of the verb, but English does not.

Please see this answer.

Solution 2:

The first answer you received is as technically correct as it is utterly useless to you, even down to the fact that the answer you're invited to read partly contridicts the one you're reading. "Morphological inflections related to time" means changes to a verb form that indicate the time referenced by the verb. For instance, if I say

[1a] I stare at my computer screen, and I despair.

you know what I am doing at the present time because the two verbs, stare and despair have the present tense form. They're said to be "in the present tense". If I say

[1b] Yesterday, I stared at my computer screen, and I despaired.

you know what I was doing in the past, not only because of the word yesterday, but also because the verb forms have now changed. They both end in -ed, which is a past tense form. Now, when I say

[1c] Tomorrow, I will stare at my computer screen, an I will despair.

you know what I think I will be doing tomorrow, but not because of the verb forms -- they're back to the present tense forms of 1a. The indication of future time comes from the presence of the word will, which was called "a modal auxiliary", which is a fancy way to say an additional word that conveys a particular meaning.

If you visit me at my office and ask me what I'm doing, I won't answer with 1a, even though 1a tells what I am doing in the present. Instead, I'll say

[1d] I am staring at my computer screen.

Now, the verb form has changed to add the suffix -ing, but that doesn't count as a verb tense because the change doesn't tell you about the time. If you asked me what I did yesterday, I'd say

[1e] I was staring at my computer screen.

Same verb form as 1d, different time. The times are indicated by modal auxiliaries am and was. The -ing tells you about the duration of the action, that it is or was ongoing. In addition, the -ing is used for verb forms that can appear in other parts of sentences besides the predicate. For example,

[2] Staring at my computer screen is not good for me.

where staring serves as the subject of the sentence.

What you really want to know is how verb constructions in English map to the timeline, traditionally illustrated as a dot representing now, with a line to the left representing the past an a line to the right representing the future. For an introduction, go here.

Alas, English verb constructions have a complicated relationship to time, and they also indicate non-temporal meanings (called aspects) that include possibility, ability, hypotheticality, duration, completion, etc.