Tense Marking
Tense is normally indicated by a verb form, either on the main verb or on an auxiliary verb. The tense markers are normally affixes, but also stem modification such as ablaut or reduplication can express tense reference, and in some languages tense can be shown by clitics. Often combinations of these can interact, such as in Irish, where there is a proclitic past tense marker do (various surface forms) used in conjunction with the affixed or ablaut-modified past tense form of the verb. Languages that do not have grammatical tense, such as Chinese, express time reference through adverbials, time phrases, and so on.
Read more about this topic: Grammatical Tense
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