A WORD, PLEASE:Here’s help with verb conjugation

Microsoft has just filed a patent application for a new software program that conjugates verbs. My source for this information, IDG News Service, calls this is good news for struggling students. But it’s bad news for me.

All those late nights I spent trying to memorize verb conjugations will no longer give me any edge whatsoever over a drunk, slacker, “South Park”-addicted remedial English student with a laptop.

So, before Microsoft releases this technology, eradicating incorrect verb conjugations the way it eradicated misspellings, bad grammar and Netscape, I thought I’d share with you some stuff I took the time to learn before Microsoft rendered my wisdom obsolete (but not necessarily before I sat down to write this column).

Conjugation refers to the way we inflect (tailor) a verb according to tense, number, person, mood or aspect.

That sounds heavy, but it’s about stuff you know already. “I work” is conjugated in the first-person (person) singular (number) present (tense), indicative (mood). The indicative is the basic mood we communicate in, distinguished from imperative, “Work!” and subjunctive, “If I worked.”

I’m not in the mood to mess with mood, so we’ll stick to the indicative. Aspect we’ll get to in a minute.

The most basic verb conjugations are for simple present, simple past and future tenses.

“I work,” obviously, is the present tense (please note that grammaticality doesn’t guarantee factuality, which means that “I work” may not be completely honest coming from me.) “I worked” is the past tense. And “I will work” is future.

Unlike a lot of foreign languages, there’s very little change in verb conjugations from person to person. For regular verbs, only the third-person singular, “he/she,” takes a different form — called the “-s form.” I work. You work. He works. She works. We work. They work. In Spanish, French, Italian and a lot of other languages, the verb takes a different form for every one of these speakers. But on this front, at least, we English speakers lucked out.

Now I know what you’re thinking: You already know how to use “work,” “works,” “worked” and “will work.” There’s no need to know the names of the tenses. But trust me: You’ll thank me when this column saves you $300 you would have otherwise handed over to the Microsoft Corp. when and if their fabulous new technology hits the shelves.

Besides, here comes some slightly more arcane and proportionately more useful information: There also exists something called “aspect,” which includes the types “perfect” and “progressive.”

The “perfect” aspect is used to talk about something happening in the past from the perspective of the present. It uses some form of “have.” “I have seen the light,” “John has landed a job.” “The dogs have sniffed each other.”

Again, a construction you use effortlessly.

What about “I had seen the light,” “John had landed a job” and “the dogs had sniffed each other?” Well, those are also perfect, but they’re past perfect. Our clue was the replacement of the present “has/have” with the past “had.”

Progressive aspect is more intuitive. For example, which of the following would you guess is in the progressive aspect: “I walk” or “I am walking”?

That’s right, “I am walking” describes something ongoing, continuous, as it’s progressing. It always takes some form of “to be,” like the “am” in “I am walking,” combined with an -ing participle, also called the present participle.

So, just as there is a present perfect and a past perfect, there’s also a present progressive and a past progressive.

Because “I am walking” is present progressive, “I was walking” is past progressive.

Of course, there’s more. For example, both aspects can be combined to give you stuff like the present perfect progressive, “has been working,” but alas, that column likely will never be.

For one thing, I can’t imagine you’d tolerate much more linguo-jargon over your morning java. For another, Microsoft is about to render all this stuff moot, anyway. At least they’re not introducing column-writing software.