“If I was you, I wouldn’t have went there and did that.”
“This agency is ran by the Deaf.”
“I move that the board purchases a new computer.”
“It is mandatory that she is on time, and that she has fun and does a good job.”
Do the above phrases sound right to you? If you answered no, your ear is finely tuned to the proper use of tenses in English grammar. If you answered yes, or were unsure, you may be running the risk of annoying—or worse, confusing—your hearing audience, and making a Deaf person sound less educated than s/he is.
This article will cover two of the most often misused tenses in the English language: the past participle and the subjunctive. In some regional dialects, these tenses seem to have disappeared, but they are still very much a part of Standard English. Let’s look at the examples above to see if we can make more sense of them with the proper tenses.
Daniel Greene 