English verb tenses

In the second article in this series I want to consider English verbs and tenses. There is a superficial simplicity about the English verb. Even an irregular one like take has a maximum of only 5 forms: take, takes, taking, took and taken. And regular verbs like work have only 4 forms: work, works, working and worked. (Compare this with French verbs, which can have more than 30 different endings.) Even the names of some tenses lead us to believe in the ease of English - we refer for example to the present simple and the past simple! And the present simple is used to talk about the present, whereas the past simple is used to talk the past. For example, I live in Frankfurt (present simple) or "I went to the theater last night" (past simple). What could be easier?

But look at the following sentences:

		Tense Form	Time Reference
1.	I’ll tell her when I see her.	present	future
2.	Hurry up, the train leaves in 5 minutes!	present	future
3.	I was just sitting there quietly when in he comes and starts hitting me on the arm.	present	past
4.	I’ve not seen the film, but my friend tells me it’s very good!	present	past
5.	When I asked him, he told me he didn’t like you.	past	present
6	I wouldn’t tell you, even if you paid me a million dollars!	past	future
7.	I’d be surprised if it snowed tomorrow.	past	future
8.	I wish I had a lot of money.	past	present
9.	I was hoping we might change the time of our meeting	past	present
10.	What name was it, please?	past	present

Explanation of these sentences

In each of the sentences above there is a lack of correspondence between tense form and time reference. In other words, the past tense form does not refer to a state or event in past time, and similarly with the present tense. These uses of the present and past tense forms are relatively uncommon, however, and for this reason they are not generally the aspect of the English verb system that causes learners the most difficulty. More problematic is making the choice between the simple and continuous forms of the verb