Grammatical tense

The English noun tense comes from Old French "time" (spelled in modern French through deliberate archaization), from Latin , "time". It is not related to the adjective tense, which comes from Latin , the perfect passive participle of , "stretch". ==Uses of the term==

In modern linguistic theory, tense is understood as a category that expresses (grammaticalizes) time reference; namely one which, using grammatical means, places a state or action at a time relative to that of the utterance. Nonetheless, in many descriptions of languages, particularly in traditional European grammar, the term "tense" is applied to verb forms or constructions that express not merely position in time, but also other properties of the state or action – particularly aspectual or modal properties. 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); the former may employ a perfect tense, but such a relationship between aspect and tense may not be simple. Some of the traditional "tenses" express time reference together with aspectual information. In Latin and French, for example, the imperfect denotes past time in combination with imperfective aspect, while other verb forms (the Latin perfect, and the French or ) are used for past time reference with perfective aspect. The category of mood is used to express modality, which includes such properties as uncertainty, evidentiality, and obligation. Commonly encountered moods include the indicative, subjunctive, and conditional. 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, there are many verb forms and constructions which combine time reference with continuous and/or perfect aspect, and with indicative, subjunctive or conditional mood. ==Possible tenses==

Not all languages have tense: tenseless languages include Dyirbal. Some languages have all three basic tenses (the past, present, and future), while others have only two: some have past and nonpast tenses, the latter covering both present and future times, as in Arabic, Japanese, and English; whereas others such as Greenlandic, Quechua, and Nivkh have future and nonfuture. Some languages have four or more tenses, making finer distinctions either in the past (e.g. remote vs. recent past) or in the future (e.g. near vs. remote future). The six-tense language Kalaw Lagaw Ya of Australia has the remote past, the recent past, the today past, the present, the today/near future and the remote future. Some languages, like the Amazonian Cubeo language, have a historical past tense, used for events perceived as historical. Tenses that refer specifically to "today" are called hodiernal tenses; these can be either past or future. Apart from Kalaw Lagaw Ya, another language with such tenses is Mwera, a Bantu language of Tanzania. It is also suggested that in 17th-century French, the passé composé served as a hodiernal past. Tenses that refer 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 Swahili, is the persistive tense, used to indicate that a state or ongoing action still continues (or, if in the negative, does not). The Washo language has tenses to indicate that an event occurred before the speaker's lifetime. Some languages have special tense forms that are used to express relative tense. Tenses that refer to the past relative to some time other than that of the utterance 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 tenses are also sometimes analysed as aspects: 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, 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. ==Tense marking==

Morphology of tense Tense is normally indicated by the use of a particular verb form – either an inflected form of the main verb, or a multi-word construction, or both in combination. Inflection may involve the use of affixes, such as the -ed ending that marks the past tense of English regular verbs, Multi-word tense constructions often involve auxiliary verbs or clitics. Examples which combine both types of tense marking include the French passé composé, which has an auxiliary verb together with the inflected past participle form of the lexical verb; The conjugation patterns of verbs often also reflect agreement with categories pertaining to the subject, such as person, number and gender via portmanteau morphs. It is thus not always possible to identify elements that mark any specific category, such as tense, separately from the others. Nominal tense PROP:proprietive case A few languages have been shown to mark tense information (as well as aspect and mood) on nouns. This may be called nominal tense, or more broadly nominal TAM which includes nominal marking of aspect and mood as well. For example, the Kayardild language uses case markers to mark tense: The verb stays the same, with the modal cases being used to show tense in the sentences. (Kalaallisut) and Guaraní. Tenseless languages can and do refer to time, but they do so using lexical items that establish time reference, or by using combinations of aspect, mood. For example, most Sinitic languages express time reference chiefly by lexical means – through adjuncts, 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 le and guò, which in most cases place an action in past time.) allow an adverb (Adv) between a tense-marked verb (V) and its direct object (O); in other words, they permit [Verb-Adverb-Object] order. In contrast, other languages (such as English) do not allow an adverb to come between a tense-marked lexical verb and its direct object, and instead require [Adverb-Verb-Object] order. (For tense-marked auxiliary verbs in English, either position of the adverb is possible.) Tense in syntax is represented by the category label T, which is the head of a TP (tense phrase). ==In particular languages==

The study of modern languages has been greatly influenced by the grammar of the Classical languages, since early grammarians, often monks, had no other reference point to describe their language. Latin terminology is often used to describe modern languages, sometimes with a change of meaning, as with the application of "perfect" to forms in English that do not necessarily have perfective meaning, or the terms Imperfekt and Perfekt to German past tense forms that mostly lack any relationship to the aspects suggested by those terms. Indo-European languages Proto-Indo-European verbs had present, aorist and perfect forms – these can be considered as representing two tenses (present and past) with different aspects. Most Indo-European languages have developed systems either with two morphological tenses (present or "non-past", and past) or with three (present, past and future). The tenses often form part of entangled tense–aspect–mood conjugation systems. • Present (praesēns) • Future simple (futūrum) • Past imperfect (praeteritum imperfectum) • Perfect (praesēns perfectum) or aorist • Future perfect (futūrum perfectum) • Pluperfect (plūs quam perfectum, praeteritum perfectum) A newer grammar of Latin also lists these six but comments that "The distinction between imperfective and perfective 'tenses' is really a distinction of aspect, which is at the basis of the whole conjugation system"; and states that Latin thus has just three tenses: present, past, and future. Ancient Greek The paradigms for tenses in Ancient Greek are similar to those in Latin, but with a three-way aspectual contrast in the past: the aorist, perfect and imperfect. Both aorist and imperfect verbs can represent a past event: through contrast, the imperfect verb often implies a longer duration (e.g. 'they urged him' vs. 'they persuaded him'). The aorist participle represents the first event of a two-event sequence, and the present participle an ongoing event at the time of another event. Perfect verbs stand for past actions if the result is still present (e.g. 'I have found it') or for present states resulting from a past event (e.g. 'I remember'). Germanic languages The Germanic languages (which include English) have present (non-past) and past tenses formed morphologically, English English has only two morphological tenses: the present (or non-past), as in he goes, and the past (or preterite), as in he went. The non-past usually references the present, but sometimes the future (as in the bus leaves tomorrow). 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. Slavic languages In the Slavic languages, verbs are intrinsically perfective or imperfective. In Russian and other East Slavic languages, 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 forms made with an auxiliary (see Bulgarian verbs). However it doesn't have a 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). Celtic languages Old Irish, an early Celtic language, had past, present and future tenses. The past tense contrasts the perfective and imperfective aspects. 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 Persian, an Indo-Iranian language, has past and non-past forms, with additional aspectual distinctions. Future can be expressed using the auxiliary xâstan, but almost never in non-formal contexts, for which the present tense is used instead. Austronesian languages DIR:directional Rapa Rapa is a French Polynesian language of the island of Rapa Iti. Verbs in the indigenous Old Rapa occur with a TAM (tense, aspect, or mood) marker which can be followed by directional or deictic particles. "The primary tense–aspect markers used in Old Rapa are the imperfective, progressive, perfective, past, imperative, and subjunctive." In some cases, realis mood is used for the present — often for stative clauses. An irrealis mood is used for the future. Other languages Finnish and Hungarian, both members of the Uralic language family, have morphological present (non-past) and past tenses. The Hungarian verb van ("to be") also has a future form. Turkish verbs 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. Other Chinese languages and many other East Asian languages generally lack inflection and are considered to be tenseless, although they often have aspect markers which convey information about time reference. ==See also==