0

Is it necessary that the tense of the entire sentence should be the same?

In the following sentence

I declined the invitation not because I did not want to go, but because I have no time.

According to my book have must be converted to had, because the sentence is framed in the past tense.

But I think the above sentence is correct, because if I never have time is a fact, then it (I never have time) will be true in all the tenses, and hence use of present indefinite tense is not wrong

Improve this question
1
  • 1
    Your book is wrong. Both Present and Past are syntactically and idiomatically fine in your context. The choice of tense depends on what you mean, not "grammatical rules".
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Sep 11, 2019 at 16:25

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
3

There is no rule that all verbs in a sentence must have the same tense. If your meaning combines concepts occurring in different time frames, then you can use different verb tenses in your sentence.

It isn't hard to come up with lots of examples. E.g. "I am now financially secure (present), because I just won the lottery (past)."

Your sentence illustrates this perfectly: declining the invitation happened in the past, and the reason is ongoing in the present as well as the past.

You could say it as your book prescribes:

I declined the invitation not because I did not want to go, but because I had no time.

But if what you want to say is that you currently just don't have time to do fun things, there is nothing wrong with saying it your way:

I declined the invitation not because I did not want to go, but because I have no time.

If we had to use just one verb tense throughout a sentence, our opportunities for expression in English would be seriously limited.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.