Question

What is the past, present and future of 'to laugh', 'to sing' and 'to cry'?

Answer 1

Hint: In English, we will use the idea of tenses to refer to time in three ways: past, present, or future. When talking about a period of time, tense is used in many languages. The past tense refers to something that happened in the past or in a time before, then the present tense talks about what is happening now and finally the future tense says what can happen after a while.

Complete answer:
Clearly each tense as per their names, describes the time. So the past tense can describe an activity performed in the past or a timeline that is already over, then the present tense is used for describing the momentary happenings, and the future tense will give an activity performed in a future timeline.

General rules to make each of the tenses from the given verbs are as follows:
(i) To make a given verb into the present tense form, we can take the given base verb and eliminate the ‘to’. So from the infinitive verb remove ‘to’, to get the present tense. But in the third person singular form, the present tense verb ends with an ‘s’.
(ii) To make a given verb into the past tense form, for regular verbs we can add –ed at the end of the infinitive, but there are some irregular verbs whose tense conjugation will be explicitly for them. It does not differ with subject so the verb conjugation remains the same for every person.
(iii) To make a given verb into the future tense form, just write it as ‘will + base verb or infinitive’. It does not change with the subject so the conjugation is the same for all persons.

We are given three different verbs ‘to laugh’, ‘to sing’ and ‘to cry’.
For ‘to laugh’; it is regular
Present form: I/we/you/they laugh, he/she/it laughs
Past form: laughed
Future form: will laugh

For ‘to sing’; this is an irregular verb so its formation is slightly different.
Present form: I/we/you/they sing, he/she/it sings
Past form: sang
Future form: will sing

For ‘to cry’; it is irregular for the third person present form
Present form: I/we/you/they cry, he/she/it cries
Past form: cried
Future form: will cry

Note: We just covered the simpler aspect of tenses, so after that we come to combination tenses.
- Progressive or "continuous" conjugations result from the progressive time: present continuous, past continuous, and future continuous.
- Perfect tenses result from the perfective feature: present perfect, past perfect, and future perfect.
- Perfect continuous tenses can be created by combining the two characteristics: present perfect continuous, past perfect continuous, and future perfect continuous.