Towards the end of February, I received questions about tough, counterintuitive aspects of English grammar from a Filipina friend who taught English as a second language (TESOL) for many years in Hong Kong. We had often corresponded on English usage until she retired a couple of years ago and came back to the Philippines.
From her Visayan hometown she now wrote me: “Here, I take time out to teach English to my helpers. I point out to them that they’ll surely want to do better than just being domestics and caregivers, especially if they have plans to work abroad.
IMAGE CREDIT: GOABROAD.COM “For my TESOL classes I obviously had to learn the grammar of what I’m asking you, but being old and decrepit now and losing memory cells, I’ve forgotten how to explain why sentence constructions like the following are grammatically faulty: ‘While I followed the instructions, it
did not encouraged my friend...” and ‘They
did not attended Mass when they went to church...’
“Why is it that for such negative constructions, it’s wrong to use the helping verb in the past tense followed by the main verb also in the past tense—
‘did not encouraged,’ ‘did not attended Mass’? It’s tough for those who don’t instinctively know the grammar rules behind this usage, so even if you have already tackled this subject in your website, I hope you can find time to explain this in your column.”
My reply to my English-teacher friend, who requested not to be named here:
The correct grammar usage for those two negative constructions—
“did not encourage,” “did not attend Mass”—does very often escape the grasp of many nonnative English learners. This is because this usage is actually counterintuitive. Take the first example: instead of making the helping verb “do” and the main verb “encourage” both take the past tense—“
did not
encouraged”—the prescribed usage makes the helping verb take the past tense “did” but makes the main verb “encourage” take what looks like the present-tense “encourage.”
IMAGE CREDIT: ENGAMES.EUThis arises from two very peculiar rules in English—I’m almost tempted to say “quirkish” because very few other languages are known to use them—that must be followed when constructing negative statements.
Rule #1 is that it’s the helping verb—not the main verb—that takes the tense. This is why in the sentence “I
did not like her,” for example, the helping verb “do” takes the past tense “did” but the main verb “like” doesn’t likewise take the past tense “liked.” Indeed, although the verb “like” here looks like it’s in the present tense, this form definitely isn’t in the present tense. It’s the infinitive form instead of the verb “to like” stripped of the function word “to”—a bare infinitive that results when “to” is dropped from the infinitive “to like.” This is therefore not a choice between using the past-tense “liked” or the present-tense “like.” The inability to recognize this crucial grammatical distinction between the present tense and the bare infinitive very often leads to a deadlock in arguments over which verb takes the tense in negative sentence constructions.
Rule 2 is that the helping verb must come before the word that negates the main verb. Thus, in the sentence “I
did not like her,” the past tense of the helping verb “do” comes before the negator “not,” after which the bare infinitive form of the main verb “like” follows. This is why unlike other languages that negate sentences by putting a negator word at their beginning or tail end, English uses the negative form “do not” or (much more often) its contracted form “don’t.”
Next week I’ll take up English prepositions, which my Filipina TESOL teacher-friend finds to be also stumbling blocks to Filipino learners of English.
(Next:
Tough, counterintuitive aspects of English grammar - 2) March 21, 2019
This essay, 1,135th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the March 14, 2019 print edition of The Manila Times
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