Q: Why is the present tense, not the past, used in this sentence: “I hear you’re leaving the country”? And why are “see” and “hear” now dynamic, not stative, on TV news? Grammar books say you can’t use progressive tenses with stative verbs, but I often hear reporters say things like “We are seeing a forest in flames.”
A: The verbs “see” and “hear” can express either states or actions. As stative verbs, one “sees” (perceives with the eyes) a rainbow or “hears” (perceives with the ears) thunder. As action, or dynamic, verbs, “see” and “hear” have many other senses:
“See” can mean to be a spectator (“I’m seeing Hamlet next week”); to understand (“He could see what Rhonda meant”); to experience (“I don’t want to see another hurricane”); to meet (“The doctor is seeing patients now”); to visit (“I’m seeing the Eiffel Tower tomorrow”), and so on.
“Hear” can mean to take up a legal issue (“The judge is hearing evidence next week”); to pay attention (“He never hears what I say”): to be informed (“Did you hear what Billie bought?”; to attend (“Are you hearing the Mass in B Minor tomorrow?”); to detect (“I could hear anger in her voice”), and so on.
As you can see by the examples above, the active senses of the verbs “see” and “hear” are often used in progressive (“-ing”) tenses. The usage isn’t all that new. Here’s an example we’ve found from the mid-19th century:
“ ‘I travel for improvement. I’m seeing the world’— said Miss Judd, pertinaciously walking out of the room” (from “Nothing Morally Wrong,” a short story by Eliza Leslie in Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, Philadelphia, July 1849).
And here’s a nonfiction example from the later 19th century: “I’m seeing the old man just now about fixing up three of my machines” (from A Fast Life on the Modern Highway, 1874, by Joseph Taylor, a book about the railroad industry).
We’ve already written about the use of the present tense by authors and journalists to express the past and the future. In a 2013 post, When the past is present, we discuss the use of the present to quote someone else’s words, a convention sometimes referred to as the “literary present.”
In literary criticism and other writing about authors, for example, you’ll see comments like “As Tacitus says …” or “In his earlier novels, Roth writes …” or “Here’s how Alan Furst describes ….”
In a 2009 post, Tense about the present, we discuss a similar convention, often called the “historical present,” where the present tense is used to narrate events in the past. This device is used frequently in nonfiction writing and journalism.
We invented an example: “The walls of Troy are still standing after a 10-year siege by the Greeks. Then Odysseus and his best warriors hide inside a giant wooden horse and trick the Trojans into dragging it inside the gates. At night, the Greeks slip out and let in the rest of their army.”
Why the present tense? As we explain in our earlier posts, because a literary work—no matter when it was created—presents itself to the reader in an unchanging present, as if it were being written as we read.
However, when referring to a literary work in relation to its historical time, the past tense is generally used: “Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark in the late 16th or early 17th centuries.”
Newspaper headline writers also use the present tense for the past or future, as in this headline in The New York Times on July 21, 1969: “MEN WALK ON MOON.”
And broadcasters often use the present in headline-ese teasers: “Mom dies in leap from bridge–news at eleven!” In covering sports on the air, the present may be used for the past or future in play-by-play commentary: “If he catches that pass, he scores easily.”
We’ll end with an example of “see” and “hear” from the The Gospel of Matthew (13:13) in the West Saxon Gospels, dating from the Old English of the late 10th century:
“For-þam ic spece to heom mid byspellen. for-þam þe lokiende hyo ne geseoð. & ge-herende hyo ne ge-hereð. ne ne on-geteð” (“Therefore I speak to them with parables: because looking they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand).”
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