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aalphabet
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aalphabet
A new textbook focused on recent advances in artificial intelligence was assigned by out instructor

How do i know if Focused or Assigned is the past tense verb? Why can't i say A new textbook was focused on recent advances in artificial intelligence assigned by out instructor?

I also initially thought the subject was textbook and verb was focused. I thought a textbook could do the action of focusing..


To answer your questions..
1) focus, assign are base form of verbs and when you add 'ed' to them ,they become past tense. Most of verbs follow the same rule.
2) in the initial sentence the statement could be ...
A new text book ( focused on....) was assigned by....
So focused on.. works as a we modifier modifying the textbook..
In the sentence you have made..
Assigned by... Will modify artificial intelligence and would mean artificial intelligence that was assigned by .. completely wrong

It would be good to go through some good grammar book for understanding all the concepts of tense etc..
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aalphabet

See if this helps.
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aalphabet
A new textbook focused on recent advances in artificial intelligence was assigned by out instructor

How do i know if Focused or Assigned is the past tense verb? Why can't i say A new textbook was focused on recent advances in artificial intelligence assigned by out instructor?
Hi aalphabet, actually in this sentence, neither focused nor assigned is a verb. Both are Past Participles.

The only verb here is was.

By the way, this indeed comes out as a slightly tricky question, because following is also a valid sentence (with focused used as a verb):

A new textbook focused on recent advances in artificial intelligence.

In the original sentence, one way to tell is that if focused were used as a verb, then there should have been an "and" connecting the two verbs. So, sentence would have been:

A new textbook focused on recent advances in artificial intelligence AND was assigned by our instructor.

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