A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.

[1][note 1]

Some typical tenses are present, past, and future.

Tense can make finer distinctions than simple past-present-future; past tenses for example can cover general past, immediate past, or distant past, with the only difference between them being the distance on the timeline between the temporal reference points. Such distinctions are not precise: an event may be described in the remote past because it feels remote to the speaker, not because a set number of days have passed since it happened; it may also be remote because it is being contrasted with another, more recent, past event. This is similar to other forms of deixis such as this and that. In absolute tense, as in English, tense indicates when the time of assertion, time of completion, or time of evaluation occurs relative to the utterance itself (time of utterance). In relative tense, on the other hand, tense is relative to some given event. The number of tenses in a language may be disputed, because the term tense is often used to represent any combination of tense proper, aspect, and mood. In many texts the term "tense" may erroneously indicate qualities of uncertainty, frequency, completion, duration, possibility, or whether information derives from experience or hearsay (evidentiality).
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Tense differs from aspect, which

encodes how a situation or action occurs in time rather than when. In many languages, there are grammatical forms which express several of these meanings (see tense-aspect-mood). In languages which have tenses, they are normally usually indicated by a verb or modal verb. Some languages only have grammatical expression of time through aspect; others have neither tense nor aspect. Some East Asian isolating languages such as Chinese express time with temporal adverbs, but these are not required, and the verbs are not inflected for tense. In Slavic languages such as Russian a verb may be inflected for both tense and aspect together.
Contents
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1 Etymology 2 Examples

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2.1 Latin and Ancient Greek 2.2 English 2.3 Other languages

3 Classification 4 See also 5 Notes

6 References 7 Bibliography 8 External links

[edit]Etymology Tense comes from Old French tens "time", from Latin tempus "time",[2] a translation of Greek chrnos "time".[3][4] "Tense" as an adjective is unrelated, since it comes from the perfect passive participle of the Latin verb tendere "stretch".[5] [edit]Examples [edit]Latin

and Ancient Greek

The word "tense" is used in the grammar of Latin and Ancient Greek as a morphological category of verbs. Latin is said to have six tenses:       Present Imperfect Future Perfect Pluperfect Future perfect

The tenses of Ancient Greek are similar, with an additional tense called the aorist. The study of modern languages like English has been greatly influenced by the grammar of these languages, and their terminology is sometimes used to describe modern languages. This leads to sentences like "He had walked" in English being labelled as "pluperfect". Another example is that six tenses in German have been identified which correspond to the six Latin tenses above. [edit]English See also: English verbs#Overview of syntactic constructions English has two true tenses, past and present (sometimes analysed as non-past). These are distinguished by the inflection of the verb, by either ablaut or a suffix -ed (walks ~ walked, sings ~ sang). The future is expressed with a modal construction, which is not a true tense,[6] and does not always appear (it is optional in subordinate constructions such as I hope you (will) go tomorrow, and is prohibited with other modals as in I can go tomorrow, but past tense cannot be similarly omitted: *I hope you go yesterday, *I can go yesterday). English also has so-called "compound tenses", such as the past

perfect and present progressive, which use modals to combine tense with other grammatical categories such as aspect. Tense, aspect, and modals in English

Aspect Tense Modal Perfect Progressive

- (nonpast) (none) (none) (none) -ed (past) will (future) have -en (perfect) be -ing (progressive)

go, goes went

will go

have gone

be going