Tense and time
Tense is the name of the class of grammatical markers used to signal the location of situations in time, such as English sing–sang–had sung–will sing. A language’s tense system isn’t its only means for signifying temporal relations, of course: as well as grammatical markers, languages have lexical means of referring to temporal distinctions – words like English now, then, yesterday, formerly and so on. Usually a much greater range of temporal distinctions can be expressed lexically than by the grammatical markers: languages have lexical expressions which mean the week before my mother’s birthday, but there is no tense that can express this meaning. Some languages, indeed, lack a system of grammatical tense anything like the one familiar from languages like English or German.
Tense markers are typically found on verbs. (See Nordlinger and Sadler 2004 for a survey of tense in nominals.) The moment of speaking typically provides the point around which temporal reference is ‘anchored’, in the same way that the speaker and their location constitute the ‘deictic centre’ for person and place deixis (see 3.2.3). Just as the speaker’s own per son is the ‘I’ and their spatial location is the ‘here’, so the time of utterance is the ‘now’. This ‘now’ is what serves to locate the other temporal categories of the language. In tense systems which distinguish past, present and future tenses, the timeframe evoked by present tense verbs will typically include the ‘now’ of utterance, but it will by no means be limited to it. The events and states expressed by verbs usually last longer than the actual moment of speaking. Really only in explicitly performative uses of verbs (4.1) such as ‘I promise’ or ‘I apologise’ can the time of the event and the time of utterance be said to overlap. The activity or state referred to by a present tense form will usually also have been true in the immediate past and may also extend into the future; use of the present tense, however, simply asserts that the action or state in question obtains now.
QUESTION Can habitual uses of the present tense, like Jane flies to Canberra be reconciled with this last statement? If so, how?
QUESTION Sometimes the present tense is used for past time situations: I hear you’re getting married; Glen tells me you’ve been sacked. Are there other examples like this? Can you explain this use of the present?
Three basic temporal divisions are relevant to the representation of time in language: what is happening now, what will happen afterwards, and what has already happened. These three distinct temporal zones can be treated in a number of different ways. Some languages display a three-way division between past, present and future, with each tense marked separately on the verb, as in (27). Others have a two-way distinction; either between past and non-past, as in (28), or (more rarely) future and non-future as in (29) (examples (27) and (29) are from Chung and Timberlake 1985: 204–205):
Languages with bipartite systems will, of course, have other means of indicating distinctions within the non-past or non-future categories. Adverbs with meanings like ‘tomorrow’, ‘now’, ‘at some point in the future’, ‘formerly’ are obvious examples. However, no language is recorded as having a single tense covering both past and future: it would seem that the regions of temporal reference covered by a single tense have to be continuous (Comrie 1985: 15).
One reason for the lack of any grammatical categories which merge past and future meanings may be that the future has rather a different status from the past (and, for that matter, from the present). Whereas past and present events are usually knowable, at least in principle, what is going to happen in the future is unknown. This means that a much greater deal of uncertainty attaches to future meanings; as a result, the grammatical category of future is often mixed up with modal categories – categories which register the speaker’s attitude to and degree of confidence in the events reported. We can see this in the following examples from Lakota, which show the same morpheme that expresses futurity also being used in modal contexts:
This added modal coloration of future meanings may be what blocks the assimilation of past and future into a single category.
Many languages express gradations within the past or future. In Cocama (Tupi, Peru; Fabricius-Hansen 2006: 568), there are three past tenses, each of which indicates a different depth of temporal distance from the moment of utterance:
The tense system of some languages, like Tiwi (isolate; Australia), Yandruwandha (Pama-Nyungan; Australia; extinct) or Kom (Niger-Congo; West Africa), includes morphemes indicating the time of day (e.g. morning, evening) at which the situation denoted by the verb occurs. Yet others, like Haya (Niger-Congo; Tanzania), have past tenses which encode a contrast between ‘earlier today’, ‘yesterday’ and ‘before yesterday’.
