ENGLISH has two emphatic tense forms that emphasize actions or states happening in the present and those that occurred in the past.

Before discussing them, however, we must strongly keep in mind that two variants of these forms are used in sentence constructions where emphasis is not intended. The first variant works with the adverb 'not' in negative sentences, and the second variant forms the interrogative mode by inverting the normal sentence construction to form a question. We must fully understand this distinction to avoid mistakes in using the emphatic tenses.