Grammatical Tense

Grammatical Tense

In grammar, tense is a category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place. Tense is the grammaticalisation of time reference, and in general is understood to have the three delimitations of "before now", i.e. the past; "now", i.e. the present; and "after now", i.e. the future. The "unmarked" reference for tense is the temporal distance from the time of utterance, the "here-and-now", this being absolute-tense. Relative-tense indicates temporal distance from a point of time established in the discourse that is not the present, i.e. reference to a point in the past or future, such as the future-in-future, or the future of the future (at some time in the future after the reference point, which is in the future) and future-in-past or future of the past (at some time after a point in the past, with the reference point being a point in the past).

Not all languages grammaticalise tense, and those that do differ in their grammaticalisation thereof. Not all grammaticalise the three-way system of past–present–future. For example, two-tense languages such as English and Japanese express past and non-past, this latter covering both present and future in one verb form. Four-tense languages make finer distinctions either in the past (e.g. remote vs recent past), or 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. The differences between such finer distinctions are the distance on the timeline between the temporal reference points from the present.