I’ve read in textbooks that when two clauses are joined by the て form, the tense of the verb that is in て form is dictated by the tense of the verb at the end of the sentence.
For example: 七時に起きて、朝ご飯を食べました。
So the tense of 起きて is past tense hence “woke up”
My question is, why then is it possible for there to be sentences such as the following where the tenses are clearly different:
君たちがテレビにで出ていて、私はびっくりした。
I haven’t seen any textbooks talk about て form sentences such as this where the て form is in what I guess you would describe as continuous form(?).
How do you know what tense 出ていて is in when translating the sentence into English?
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There’s nothing fundamentally different happening between your first example and your second regarding tenses, 出ていて is describing a past continuous state as evident from the tense of びっくりした.
て form in this situation is used when joining 2 sentences…..I would translate it as “and”….although sometimes when translating is better to keep both sentences separate…
七時に起きて、朝ご飯を食べました。
I woke up at 7 and ate breakfast
君たちがテレビに出ていて、私はびっくりした。
You guys are on TV. It surprised me.
(of course, this is more of a raw translation…it could always be arranged to sound more natural, but you get the point 😁)
It’s helpful to think of ている as an enduring state instead of strictly progressive. Enduring state of stative verbs (like to die) is just that – the resulting state, and for active verbs the enduring state is what we know as progressive (like to eat).
In this case 出ていて means enduring state of appearing and since the whole sentence is in the past it means “were in the state of appearing”. That probably means they appeared on tv for some time but the event overall was in the past. It’s basically like the past continuous.
[here](https://youtu.be/dNv4AHazMsI)
て is not inherently past tense, only connective. Don’t judge Japanese grammar by English translations; though this can be useful sometimes, many points don’t come across, and though we would use ‘woke’ in English, the ‘起きて’ here is in fact *tenseless* (a feature English doesn’t really have).
So, for example, if I were to say 明日は新幹線に乗って、大阪に行く, the sentence ends in the non-past ‘行く’, and since I’ve marked it as occurring tomorrow, the whole sentence, *including* 乗って, is ‘future tense’ as far as we’re concerned (note that technically Japanese is primarily divided into ‘past’ and ‘non-past’, with present and future not being as cleanly divided as in English)
TL;DR: the connective て form as in 出ていて doesn’t have a tense. Because being a connective form suggests there is always something that comes after, the tense of the sentence as a whole usually comes from other clauses, with the most basic being where the tense comes at the end.