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| Grammatical features |
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In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference.[1][2] Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their conjugation patterns.
The main tenses found in many languages include the past, present, and future. Some languages have only two distinct tenses, such as past and nonpast, or future and nonfuture. There are also tenseless languages, like most of the Chinese languages, though they can possess a future and nonfuture system typical of Sino-Tibetan languages.[3] In recent work Maria Bittner and Judith Tonhauser have described the different ways in which tenseless languages nonetheless mark time.[4][5] On the other hand, some languages make finer tense distinctions, such as remote vs recent past, or near vs remote future.
Tenses generally express time relative to the moment of speaking. In some contexts, however, their meaning may be relativized to a point in the past or future which is established in the discourse (the moment being spoken about). This is called relative (as opposed to absolute) tense. Some languages have different verb forms or constructions which manifest relative tense, such as pluperfect ("past-in-the-past") and "future-in-the-past".
Expressions of tense are often closely connected with expressions of the category of aspect; sometimes what are traditionally called tenses (in languages such as Latin) may in modern analysis be regarded as combinations of tense with aspect. Verbs are also often conjugated for mood, and since in many cases the three categories are not manifested separately, some languages may be described in terms of a combined tense–aspect–mood (TAM) system.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
Fabricius-Hansenwas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Comrie, Bernard (1976). Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 6. ISBN 978-0521290456.
the semantic concept of time reference (absolute or relative), ... may be grammaticalized in a language, i.e. a language may have a grammatical category that expresses time reference, in which case we say that the language has tenses. Some languages lack tense, i.e. do not have grammatical time reference, though probably all languages can lexicalize time reference, i.e. have temporal adverbials that locate situations in time.
- ^ Huang, Nick (2015). "On syntactic tense in Mandarin Chinese". In Tao, Hongyin (ed.). Proceedings of the 27th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (PDF). Vol. 2. Los Angeles: UCLA. pp. 406–423. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-10-11. Retrieved 2017-01-08.
- ^ Bittner, Maria (2014). Temporality: Universals and Variation. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 9781405190404.
- ^ Tonhauser, Judith (January 2015). "Cross-Linguistic Temporal Reference". Annual Review of Linguistics. 1 (1): 129–154. doi:10.1146/annurev-linguist-030514-124923. ISSN 2333-9683.