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In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference. (1976). 9780521290456, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521290456 Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of , particularly in their conjugation patterns.
The main tenses found in many languages include the past tense, present tense, and future tense. Some languages have only two distinct tenses, such as past and nonpast, or future and Nonfuture tense. There are also tenseless languages, like most of the Chinese languages, though they can possess a future and Nonfuture tense system typical of Sino-Tibetan languages. In recent work Maria Bittner and Judith Tonhauser have described the different ways in which tenseless languages nonetheless mark time. (2025). 9781405190404, Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 9781405190404 On the other hand, some languages make finer tense distinctions, such as remote vs recent past, or near vs remote future.
Tenses generally express time relative to the moment of speaking. In some contexts, however, their meaning may be relativized to a point in the past or future which is established in the discourse (the moment being spoken about). This is called relative (as opposed to absolute) tense. Some languages have different verb forms or constructions which manifest relative tense, such as pluperfect ("past-in-the-past") and "future-in-the-past".
Expressions of tense are often closely connected with expressions of the category of aspect; sometimes what are traditionally called tenses (in languages such as Latin) may in modern analysis be regarded as combinations of tense with aspect. Verbs are also often conjugated for grammatical mood, and since in many cases the three categories are not manifested separately, some languages may be described in terms of a combined tense–aspect–mood (TAM) system.
The category of aspect expresses how a state or action relates to time – whether it is seen as a complete event, an ongoing or repeated situation, etc. Many languages make a distinction between perfective aspect (denoting complete events) and imperfective aspect (denoting ongoing or repeated situations); some also have other aspects, such as a perfect aspect, denoting a state following a prior event. Some of the traditional "tenses" express time reference together with aspectual information. In Latin grammar and French grammar, for example, the imperfect denotes past time in combination with imperfective aspect, while other verb forms (the Latin perfect, and the French passé composé or passé simple) are used for past time reference with perfective aspect.
The category of Grammatical mood is used to express modality, which includes such properties as uncertainty, evidentiality, and obligation. Commonly encountered moods include the indicative mood, subjunctive mood, and conditional mood. Mood can be bound up with tense, aspect, or both, in particular verb forms. Hence, certain languages are sometimes analysed as having a single tense–aspect–mood (TAM) system, without separate manifestation of the three categories.
The term tense, then, particularly in less formal contexts, is sometimes used to denote any combination of tense proper, aspect, and mood. As regards English language, there are many verb forms and constructions which combine time reference with continuous and/or perfect aspect, and with indicative, subjunctive or conditional mood. Particularly in some English language teaching materials, some or all of these forms can be referred to simply as tenses (see below).
Particular tense forms need not always carry their basic time-referential meaning in every case. For instance, the historical present is a use of the present tense to refer to past events. The phenomenon of fake tense is common crosslinguistically as a means of marking counterfactuality in conditionals and wishes.von Fintel, Kai; Iatridou, Sabine (2020). Prolegomena to a Theory of X-Marking . Manuscript.
Tenses that refer specifically to "today" are called ; these can be either past or future. Apart from Kalaw Lagaw Ya, another language which features such tenses is Mwera language, a Bantu language of Tanzania. It is also suggested that in 17th-century French, the passé composé served as a hodiernal past. Tenses that contrast with hodiernals, by referring to the past before today or the future after today, are called pre-hodiernal and post-hodiernal respectively. Some languages also have a crastinal tense, a future tense referring specifically to tomorrow (found in some Bantu languages); or a hesternal tense, a past tense referring specifically to yesterday (although this name is also sometimes used to mean pre-hodiernal). A tense for after tomorrow is thus called post-crastinal, and one for before yesterday is called pre-hesternal.
Another tense found in some languages, including Luganda, is the persistive tense, used to indicate that a state or ongoing action is still the case (or, in the negative, is no longer the case). Luganda also has tenses meaning "so far" and "not yet".
Some languages have special tense forms that are used to express relative tense. Tenses that refer to the past relative to the time under consideration are called anterior; these include the pluperfect (for the past relative to a past time) and the future perfect (for the past relative to a future time). Similarly, posterior tenses refer to the future relative to the time under consideration, as with the English "future-in-the-past": (he said that) he would go. Relative tense forms are also sometimes analysed as combinations of tense with aspect: the perfect aspect in the anterior case, or the prospective aspect in the posterior case.
Some languages, such as Nez perce or Cavineña also have periodic tense markers that encode that the action occurs in a recurrent temporal period of the day ("in the morning", "during the day", "at night", "until dawn" etc) or of the year ("in winter").
Some languages have cyclic tense systems. This is a form of temporal marking where tense is given relative to a reference point or reference span. In Burarra language, for example, events that occurred earlier on the day of speaking are marked with the same verb forms as events that happened in the far past, while events that happened yesterday (compared to the moment of speech) are marked with the same forms as events in the present. This can be thought of as a system where events are marked as prior or contemporaneous to points of reference on a timeline.
As has already been mentioned, indications of tense are often bound up with indications of other verbal categories, such as aspect and mood. The conjugation patterns of verbs often also reflect agreement with categories pertaining to the subject, such as person, number and gender. It is consequently not always possible to identify elements that mark any specific category, such as tense, separately from the others.
Languages that do not have grammatical tense, such as most Chinese language, express time reference chiefly by lexical means – through , time phrases, and so on. (The same is done in tensed languages, to supplement or reinforce the time information conveyed by the choice of tense.) Time information is also sometimes conveyed as a secondary feature by markers of other categories, as with the aspect markers 了 le and 過 guò, which in most cases place an action in past time. However, much time information is conveyed implicitly by context – it is therefore not always necessary, when translation from a tensed to a tenseless language, say, to express explicitly in the target language all of the information conveyed by the tenses in the source.
Tense in syntax is represented by the category label T, which is the head of a TP (tense phrase).
Imperfect tense verbs represent a past process combined with so called imperfective aspect, that is, they often stand for an ongoing past action or state at a past point in time (see secondary present) or represent habitual actions (see Latin tenses with modality) (e.g. 'he was eating', 'he used to eat'). The perfect tense combines the meanings of a simple past ('he ate') with that of an English perfect tense ('he has eaten'), which in ancient Greek are two different tenses (aorist and perfect).
The pluperfect, the perfect and the future perfect may also realise , standing for events that are past at the time of another event (see secondary past): for instance, mortuus erat, mortuus est, mortuus erit may stand for respectively 'he had died', 'he has died' and 'he will have died'.
Latin verbs are inflected for tense and aspect together with grammatical mood (indicative, subjunctive, infinitive, and imperative) and voice (active or passive). Most verbs can be built by selecting a verb stem and adapting them to endings. Endings may vary according to the speech role, the number and the gender of the subject or an object. Sometimes, verb groups function as a unit and supplement inflection for tense (see Latin periphrases). For details on verb structure, see Latin tenses and Latin conjugation.
In some contexts, particularly in English language teaching, various tense–aspect combinations are referred to loosely as tenses. Similarly, the term "future tense" is sometimes loosely applied to cases where modals such as will are used to talk about future points in time.
The Germanic languages (which include English) have present (non-past) and past tenses formed morphologically, with future and other additional forms made using auxiliaries. In standard German language, the compound past (German verbs) has replaced the simple morphological past in most contexts.
The Romance languages (descendants of Latin) have past, present and future morphological tenses, with additional aspectual distinction in the past. French language is an example of a language where, as in German, the simple morphological perfective past (passé simple) has mostly given way to a compound form (passé composé).
Irish language, a Celtic language, has past, present and future tenses (see Irish conjugation). The past contrasts perfective and imperfective aspect, and some verbs retain such a contrast in the present. Classical Irish had a three-way aspectual contrast of simple–perfective–imperfective in the past and present tenses. Modern Scottish Gaelic on the other hand only has past, non-past and 'indefinite', and, in the case of the verb 'be' (including its use as an auxiliary), also present tense.
Persian language, an Indo-Iranian language, has past and non-past forms, with additional aspectual distinctions. Future can be expressed using an auxiliary, but almost never in non-formal context. Colloquially the perfect suffix -e can be added to past tenses to indicate that an action is speculative or reported (e.g. "it seems that he was doing", "they say that he was doing"). A similar feature is found in Turkish. (For details, see Persian verbs.)
Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu), an Indo-Aryan language, has indicative perfect past and indicative future forms, while the indicative present and indicative imperfect past conjugations exist only for the verb honā (to be). The indicative future is constructed using the Subjunctive mood conjugations (which used to be the indicative present conjugations in older forms of Hind-Urdu) by adding a future future suffix - gā that declines for gender and the number of the noun that the pronoun refers to. The forms of gā are derived from the perfective participle forms of the verb "to go," jāna. The conjugations of the indicative perfect past and the indicative imperfect past are derived from participles (just like the past tense formation in Slavic languages) and hence they agree with the grammatical number and the gender of noun which the pronoun refers to and not the pronoun itself. The perfect past doubles as the perfective aspect participle and the imperfect past conjugations act as the copula to mark imperfect past when used with the aspectual participles. Hindi-Urdu has an overtly marked tense-aspect-mood system. Periphrasis Hindi-Urdu verb forms (aspectual verb forms) consist of two elements, the first of these two elements is the aspect marker and the second element (the copula) is the common tense-mood marker. Hindi-Urdu has 3 grammatical aspectsː Habitual aspect, Perfective, and Progressive; and 5 grammatical moodsː Realis mood, Grammatical mood, Subjunctive mood, Contrafactual, and Imperative mood. (Seeː Hindi verbs)
In the Slavic languages, verbs are intrinsically perfective or imperfective. In Russian language and some other languages in the group, perfective verbs have past and "future tenses", while imperfective verbs have past, present and "future", the imperfective "future" being a compound tense in most cases. The "future tense" of perfective verbs is formed in the same way as the present tense of imperfective verbs. However, in South Slavic languages, there may be a greater variety of forms – Bulgarian, for example, has present, past (both "imperfect" and "aorist") and "future tenses", for both perfective and imperfective verbs, as well as perfect aspect forms made with an auxiliary (see Bulgarian verbs). However it doesn't have real future tense, because the future tense is formed by the shortened version of the present of the verb hteti (ще) and it just adds present tense forms of person suffixes: -m (I), -š (you), -ø (he,she,it), -me (we), -te (you, plural), -t (they).
Turkish grammar conjugate for past, present and future, with a variety of aspects and moods.
Arabic verbs have past and non-past; future can be indicated by a prefix.
Korean verbs have a variety of affixed forms which can be described as representing present, past and future tenses, although they can alternatively be considered to be aspectual. Similarly, Japanese verbs are described as having present and past tenses, although they may be analysed as aspects. Some Wu Chinese languages, such as Shanghainese, use grammatical particles to mark some tenses. Other Chinese languages and many other East Asian languages generally lack inflection and are considered to be tenseless languages, although they often have aspect markers which convey certain information about time reference.
For examples of languages with a greater variety of tenses, see the section on possible tenses, above. Fuller information on tense formation and usage in particular languages can be found in the articles on those languages and their grammars.
Imperfective: denotes actions that have not occurred yet but will occur and expressed by TAM e.
Progressive: Also expressed by TAM e and denotes actions that are currently happening when used with deictic na, and denotes actions that was just witnessed but still currently happening when used with deictic ra.
Perfective: denotes actions that have already occurred or have finished and is marked by TAM ka.
In Old Rapa there are also other types of tense markers known as Past, Imperative, and Subjunctive.
Past
TAM i marks past action. It is rarely used as a matrix TAM and is more frequently observed in past embedded clauses
Imperative
The imperative is marked in Old Rapa by TAM a. A second person subject is implied by the direct command of the imperative.
For a more polite form rather than a straightforward command imperative TAM a is used with adverbial kānei. Kānei is only shown to be used in imperative structures and was translated by the French as "please".
It is also used in a more impersonal form. For example, how you would speak toward a pesky neighbor.
Subjunctive
The subjunctive in Old Rapa is marked by kia and can also be used in expressions of desire
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