Gretchen,
I think linguists have come up with a special technical term for practically every modal, but I don't know the name of the category that this use of "should" would fit into. More importantly, I do not believe it changes the tense itself--it's still present progressive.
This naming is open to debate though, depending on how people define "modal" and "tense". For some, the progressive or the perfect or BOTH are matters of tense because they also deal with elements of time, so some people would say that certain modals DO affect tense simply because they add the notions of 'perfect' or 'progressive' to the sentence.
But in my opinion, most (but not all) explanations of traditional grammar would still just call the tense of your sentence "present"--or even "present perfect progressive" if you're teaching, as many do, present and progressive as aspects of tense.
My own approach, for what it's worth, would be just to teach present/past/future as 'tense' and refer to progressive, perfect, and other modal-related changes as 'aspects' of the verb phrase. The important thing, I believe, at this age level is to get students to understand the simpler notion of tense (past, present, future) and understand that tense is always present, regardless of the modals or changes made to the ending of the main verb.
larry
-------------------------------
Larry Beason
Director of Composition
Dept. of English, Univ. of South Alabama
Mobile, AL 36688
334-460-7861
-------------------------------
>>> Gretchen Lee <[log in to unmask]> - 4/2/01 3:01 PM >>>
Hi,
A minor point came up that I couldn't answer in my English class, so I told
the kids I'd go right to the experts.
We've been studying verb tenses in my sixth grade class with an eye to their
effect on writing. I asked them to write a half-page narrative using as much
progressive tense as they could (I wanted them to notice what it did to
"voice"). We were looking at the sentences today, and I didn't know what to
call the verb phrase in the following:
The children should have been eating.
It's present perfect progressive, but does adding the modal change it to
something else? For that matter, does adding a modal change the name of any
tense?
Thanks,
Gretchen in San Jose
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