A few weeks back, I was asked this tough grammar question by a member of Jose Carillo’s English Forum: “Do noun clauses grammatically functioning as subjects in a sentence follow the sequence-of-tenses rule?”
Forum member Michael Galario presented these examples of such sentences: (1) “
How media are reporting the news is being scrutinized by the public.” (2) “
What I had for breakfast gave me heartburn.” (3) “
What she did remains a mystery.”
The term “sequence of tenses” refers to the relation between the tenses of verbs when there’s more than one verb in the sentence, and there are actually several sequence-of-tenses rules in English depending on the kind and structure of the sentence.
THE SEQUENCE OF TENSES RULE FOR REPORTED SPEECHIf it’s a simple sentence where all the verbs denote actions or states that are happening at the same time, their tenses would be the same, as in “She
nodded,
winked, and
smiled at me.” However, when the sentence is compound, complex, or compound-complex, the actions or states might have different time frames, so its verbs could take different tenses whose sequence depends on their time and logical relationship, as in “Edison
is reputed to have made a thousand and one tries
before he perfected the electric bulb.”
Recall that there’s also the so-called
normal sequence-of-tenses rule for
indirect or reported speech, which is a way of expressing the content of statements, questions, and other utterances without quoting them explicitly as is done in direct speech. For instance, a woman by the name of Nancy might have uttered this verbatim remark in your presence yesterday: “I
hate you for your bigotry.”
When you recount what Nancy said to a friend today, it normally takes the form of reported speech: “Nancy
told me yesterday that she
hated me for my bigotry.” What happens is that when the past tense “told” is used for the reporting verb “tell,” the verb of the utterance itself takes one tense backwards into the past tense, from “hate” to “hated.” There’s also the narrative option to use the present-tense “tells” for that reporting verb, in which case the verb in the utterance itself takes the present tense: “Nancy
tells me that she
hates me for my bigotry.”
Now let’s go back to Sentence 1 in Michael’s sentences with noun clauses as subjects: “
How media are reporting the news is being scrutinized by the public.” This is a complex sentence with the noun clause “how media are reporting the news” as subject (dependent clause) and “(subject) is being scrutinized by the public” (independent clause).
We can see here that since the verb form “are reporting” is a locked-in part of the noun clause “how media are reporting the news,” the verb phrase “is being scrutinized” in the independent clause is actually the only operative verb in the sentence. As such, no specific sequence of tenses or conditionality is needed for this complex construction. Indeed, its logic will remain intact even if its tenses and conditionality are changed as follows:
“How media are reporting the news
is being scrutinized by the public.”
“How media are reporting the news
will be scrutinized by the public.”
“How media are reporting the news
can be scrutinized by the public.”
“How media are reporting the news
would be scrutinized by the public.”
“How media are reporting the news should be scrutinized by the public.”
But matters radically change when any of the constructions above is made into reported speech. By using a reporting verb like, say, “argued,” the normal sequence-of-tenses rule will now apply: “The Mass Media Council
argued that how media
were reporting the news
should be scrutinized by the public.”
Without a reporting verb, however, the sequence-of-tenses rule in sentences with a noun clause as subject doesn’t come into play at all.
Next week: A subject-verb agreement peculiarity of inverted sentences
This essay first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times
in its October 29, 2016 issue, © 2016 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.RELATED READING:How to use the normal sequence-of-tenses rule for reported speech
