Other Uses of The Term "Tense" : Tense, Aspect, and Mood
In many language descriptions, particularly those of traditional European linguistics, the term tense is erroneously used to refer to categories that do not have time reference as their prototypical use, but rather are grammaticalisations of mood/modality (e.g. uncertainty, possibility, evidentiality) or aspect (e.g. frequency, completion, duration). Tense differs from aspect in showing the time reference, while aspect shows how the action/state is "envisaged" or "seen" as happening/occurring. The most common aspectual distinction in languages of the world is that between perfective (complete, permanent, simple, etc.) and imperfective (incomplete, temporary, continuous, etc.).
The term tense is therefore at times used in language descriptions to represent any combination of tense proper, aspect, and mood, as many languages include more than one such reference in portmanteau TAM (tense–aspect–mood) affixes or verb forms. Conversely, languages that grammaticalise aspect can have tense as a secondary use of an aspect. In many languages, such as the Latin, Celtic and Slavic languages, a verb may be inflected for both tense and aspect together, as in the passé composé/passé simple (historique) and imparfait of French. Verbs can also be marked for both mood and tense together, such as the present subjunctive (So be it) and the past subjuncitve (Were it so), or all three, such as the past perfect subjunctive (Had it been so).
Read more about this topic: Grammatical Tense
Famous quotes containing the words term, tense and/or mood:
“Orlando. Who stays it still withal?
Rosalind. With lawyers in the vacation; for they sleep
between term and term, and then they perceive not how Time
moves.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“A pathological business, writing, don’t you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!”
—Hans Magnus Enzensberger (b. 1929)
“This fellow is wise enough to play the fool,
And to do that well craves a kind of wit.
He must observe their mood on whom he jests,
The quality of persons, and the time,
Not, like the haggard, check at every feather
That comes before his eye. This is a practice
As full of labor as a wise man’s art.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)