Present tense

For other uses, see Present tense (disambiguation).

The present tense (abbreviated PRES or PRS) is a grammatical tense whose principal function is to locate a situation or event in the present time.[1] The present tense is used for actions which are happening now. In order to explain and understand present tense, it is useful to imagine time as a line on which the past tense, the present and the future tense are positioned. The term present tense is usually used in descriptions of specific languages to refer to a particular grammatical form or set of forms; these may have a variety of uses, not all of which will necessarily refer to present time. For example, in the English sentence "My train leaves tomorrow morning", the verb form leaves is said to be in the present tense, even though in this particular context it refers to an event in future time. Similarly, in the historical present, the present tense is used to narrate events that occurred in the past.

There are two common types of present tense form in most Indo-European languages: the present indicative (the combination of present tense and indicative mood) and the present subjunctive (the combination of present tense and subjunctive mood). The present tense is mainly classified into four parts or subtenses.

  1. Simple present : The simple present tense is employed in a sentence to represent an action or event that takes place in the present regularly.
  2. Present perfect : The present perfect tense is utilized for events that begin in the past and continue to the moment of speaking, or to express the result of a past situation.[2]
  3. Present continuous: The present continuous tense is used to describe an action that is happening right now.
  4. Present perfect continuous
  1. ^ Comrie, Bernard (1985). Tense. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23652-5.
  2. ^ Chalker, Sylvia; Weiner, Edmund; Weiner, Edmund S. C. (1998). The Oxford dictionary of English grammar. Oxford paperback reference (Reissued, with corr., in new covers ed.). Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. ISBN 978-0-19-280087-9.