Interesting past/future dilemma

Been workshopping/editing (very briefly now as they don't return the effort) and lots of problems with people tense hopping, and even worse, not realising or accepting that that is not a good thing, or a correct thing to do in a paragraph!

Anyway, whilst writing and editing my own piece for workshopping next week I came across and interesting dilemma to do with tenses.

In this case it involved "could" as in

"he could walk"

This may just me looking far too much into things and getting all meta, but to me that (very tiny truncated eg of a sentence) reads as both past and future tense. My question here is - am I going crazy, or do you see where I am coming from.

If so - are there any more? Does it have a name? And most vitally, can this tense confusion be a useful technique, or would it annoy/be too artificial to blend in...?

Kylara said:

"he could walk"

Click to expand...

That's too short a fragment. It might or might not be stating the ability to walk?

I think it's because "could" serves two different purposes.

It acts as the past tense of "can" so where the present tense sentence would be "I can walk again!" in the past tense it's "I could walk again!". But "could" is also used to suggest a possible future course of action eg "I could walk to the theatre if you wanted to take the car tonight".

So yes, it holds within itself the possibility of both past and future. The same could be said of the continuous form of verbs eg "Humming to myself, I walk down the garden" or "Humming to myself, I walked down the garden" or, just about conceivably, "Humming to myself, I will walk down the garden" -- the "humming" is ambiguous, and needs the context of the surrounding sentence to work out if it's present or past tense, or even future.

It might be fun to use these to create confusion, but I think in context much of the ambiguity would be lost.

Actually, it's not the future, it's the possible future. The conditional form of the main verb, a mere auxiliary. It hasn't happened yet, and might never, IF…

"could" indicates potential, so present or future tense applies.

"he could walk"
1. He has [now] the ability to walk [now].
2. He has [now] the potential [conditional on future events] to walk [in future].

Both are present tense, because the ability or potential exist NOW.

Past tense would be:
1. "He could have [past] walked."
2. "He could have walked, if he had to."

Sorry, I don't know the names of the formal structuring of 'past tense 2'. Future is implied as a condition, built on the immediate past tense, even though it's all written in past tense. "if he had to" might be better structured as "had he reason to", which has a future tense.

They could have arrived. (present or past)
They could have arrived yesterday.(past)
They could have arrived now.(present)
They could arrive. (present or future)
They could arrive now. (present)
They could arrive tomorrow. (future)
They could arrive yesterday. [present-future-past (time-travel)]

It really is too short to put that in context. Playing with the same example, I've thought of a past tense: "I could walk yesterday but today I'm in a wheelchair." Here I'm using the word COULD as the ability to do something, whether or not that ability existed in the past, exists in the present, or will exist in the future.

Isn't English FUN?

Just FYI, the could bit in question was just an example (in this case part of trying to work out how to transport important guy found in field with them without a horse. More of a questioning future possible)

What I was getting at was much better put by TJ, though I too feel that context may destroy any fun ambiguity I want to play with. I love a bit of clever writing and this sort of play on future/present/past usage is right up my street, I just wasn't sure if I was going crazy or not! (illness and some not great pieces to edit)

Can we think of any others? Or would they all have to be those special potential action words?