The Realisation Of Secondary Tense

Matthiessen (1995: 734):

Secondary tenses are realised by tense auxiliaries followed by the particular verb form they govern:

Secondary past is realised by the tense auxiliary have followed by the past participial form (v-en), as in have eaten; have walked; have been eating; have been walking.

Secondary present is realised by the tense auxiliary be followed by the present participial form (v-ing), as in be eating; be walking; be being eaten.

Secondary future is realised by the tense auxiliary be going + a to infinitival verb form (to v), as in be going to eat, be going to have eaten, be going to be eating. (We can also include forms such as be about to for immediate future and would as a special form for future-in-past, as in He would later regret his rash decision.)

Blogger Comments:

This is misleading because it misrepresents words as the realisation of secondary tense in univariate structure. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 398-9):

… the elements of the logical structure are not the individual words but certain rather more complex elements. … The logical structure of the verbal group realises the system of tense. … The primary tense is that functioning as Head, shown as α. This is the Deictic tense: past, present or future relative to the speech event. The modifying elements, at β and beyond, are secondary tenses; they express past, present or future relative to the time selected in the previous tense. Realisations are shown in Table 6-12.