This is a fair question, and basically you have the action of the subject (I heard...) and the action of the object (the chairman's action). In an English statement, you indicate the tense ONCE, and it's the verb of the subject. The object's action has two options: the verb doesn't change (eg. call), which means a completed action. The other option is a present participle (eg. calling), which means an unfinished action. There's no indication of tense here: we already know the tense! You will see this structure with "verbs of sense", eg. see, hear, listen to, observe, watch, feel, and so on.

Hi Andy, When you hear someone, that person is talking to you at the time you heard the person. You can't hear someone who already called your name (past tense), because the sound would be gone. "I heard he called my name" means something else. It means that someone called your name, and then someone after that told you about this person calling your name. If you draw the two sentences on a timeline, they would look something like this: I heard him call my name: X past______________________________now________________________________future I heard he called my name. X (He called my name) X (I heard about him calling my name) past______________________________now________________________________future

Excellent questions. (1) The reason there are two verbs is because there are two actions happening. The person writing this sentence is hearing, and the chairman is doing something different - calling. (2) The reason "call" is in present tense is because the first verb already was in past tense, so it's already assumed this is the past tense, so you don't need to keep conjugating to past tense. If you only wrote about the chairman, you would conjugate to paste tense: The chairman called my name. There's not a real good reason for it, but that's the English grammar. Hope this helps!