Timeline for Why do native speakers use the present continuous tense when talking about people in a picture? Why not the past continuous tense?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
20 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 10, 2021 at 22:44 | answer | added | chasly - supports Monica | timeline score: 0 | |
| Jun 3, 2020 at 19:12 | comment | added | Jyrki Lahtonen | I would switch to past continuous tense if describing what those people (possibly dead by now) were doing outside of the photo. William? He was working at the town library- | |
| Jun 3, 2020 at 8:11 | comment | added | hocikto | @Pere Slovak language for example.you can use both but thinking about it we mostly use past not present... I haven't described what was happening in the photo to someone in a while :) | |
| Jun 2, 2020 at 23:34 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @idmean Nope, not surprising. Mandarin has no morphological tenses, but when describing images and such things, the same constructions are used as when describing present (continuous) occurrences, not past occurrences. | |
| Jun 2, 2020 at 13:48 | comment | added | Pere | I asked on Linguistics SE if that is an universal feature linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/36380/… | |
| Jun 2, 2020 at 8:53 | comment | added | Strawberry | @Tom what is your native language? | |
| Jun 2, 2020 at 0:53 | vote | accept | Tom | ||
| Jun 1, 2020 at 23:57 | comment | added | T.E.D. | Well, in the picture he's still doing that isn't he? | |
| Jun 1, 2020 at 23:41 | answer | added | Benjamin Godfrey | timeline score: 2 | |
| Jun 1, 2020 at 19:28 | answer | added | Cristobol Polychronopolis | timeline score: 2 | |
| Jun 1, 2020 at 15:28 | comment | added | ljrk | I'd say the difference becomes clear if you add some omitted information: "He's wearing a nice hat [in the picture]", but "He was wearing a nice hat [when we took the photo]". However, usually the focus is on the photo, and not the situation. | |
| Jun 1, 2020 at 15:00 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackEnglishLL/status/1267470989073559554 | ||
| S Jun 1, 2020 at 14:17 | history | suggested | costrom | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Changed "people" to "speakers"; "native people" has a different connotation here...
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| Jun 1, 2020 at 14:13 | comment | added | idmean | @Pere Languages without tenses (e.g. Mandarin)? I imagine to a native speaker of such a language this could be very surprising. | |
| Jun 1, 2020 at 13:28 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Jun 1, 2020 at 14:17 | |||||
| Jun 1, 2020 at 13:00 | comment | added | Pere | Out of curiosity, which language doesn't do this? It sounds fairly natural to me because the few other languages I know enough to be sure do the same. | |
| Jun 1, 2020 at 11:47 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Jun 1, 2020 at 4:21 | answer | added | Jason Bassford | timeline score: 38 | |
| Jun 1, 2020 at 4:20 | answer | added | James K | timeline score: 15 | |
| Jun 1, 2020 at 3:47 | history | asked | Tom | CC BY-SA 4.0 |