Tense

Revision as of 10:42, 15 January 2010

Tense is a category used in the grammatical description of verbs (along with aspect and mood), referring primarily to the way the grammar marks the time at which the action denoted by the verb took place.

Natural language

In synthetic languages, the distinction between grammatical tense, aspect and mood is fuzzy and at times controversial. In order to avoid the problems concerning isolating these categories, which are often amalgamated in a single morpheme, the UNLarium proposes a single TAM (Tense-Aspect-Mood) typology, to be found here.

UNL

In UNL, tense is to be represented as attributes indicating the actual time of the event.
Tenses are broadly classified as:

• absolute tense: indicates time in relationship to the time of the utterance (i.e. "now").
• relative tense: in relationship to some other time, other than the time of utterance.

The corresponding values are the following:

The UNL representation should indicate the time rather than the grammatical tense of a form.

There is no simple one-to-one relationship between tense forms and time. In English, for instance, the present (grammatical tense) may be used to represent the future (time)

I’m going home tomorrow = go.@future.@recent (and not go.@present)

@present is used to indicate an action at the present and not habits, routines and statements

I'm in Frankfurt. = @present

I always come to school by cycle. = no tense information

The sun sets in the Occident. = no tense information

Tense values may be combined.

I'm going home tomorrow = go.@future.@recent

I had been there = @past.@anterior

Examples

List of grammatical tenses:

• English tenses
• French tenses