The category of Tense: Time & Tense

The student of English Grammar should not confuse the notice of time & tense.

Time is an objective category. It is a universal form of consecutive change of events, reflected by man through his perception and intellect. It is the basic form of existence of matter. Time exists without us & independently of us.

Tense is a verbal category, which reflects the objective category of time. It expresses the relations between the time of the process denoted by the verb & the time of the utterance through a set of morphological forms of the verb: I am reading (present) – I was reading (past) – I’ll be reading (future).

The main division of the objective time is quite obvious: it is divided into three – Past, Present & Future. However, this does not mean that that tense system of various languages are also threefold.

As far as the English language is concerned there is difference of opinions among grammarians on the number of tenses in English. It has not been settled whether the English tense system consists of three tenses (past/ Present & future) or only two (present & past). The problem is the status of the future tense.

Traditionally the finite verb is believed to have three tenses: past, present & future (Sweet, Smirnitsky, Bloch). Let’s start with the present & past tenses, which do not arouse controversy.

The Present & Past Tenses

The range of meanings expressed by the verb in the present tense is very wide: from actions or states taking place at the moment of speaking to actions and states taking place over a very long period of time and even ‘timeless’ actions. E.g.:

• The time of speaking – I hear a noise. I am reading.

• A prolonged action – We live in Novosibirsk.

• A timeless action – The earth moves round the sun.

An action feature of the present tense is its ability to express future actions. E,g,: I am leaving tomorrow. I have dinner with him on Sunday (Верховская).

In some cases the use of the present tense for future actions is structurally dependent. We find this kind of use in adverbial clauses of time & actions (When he comes/ If he comes we’ll go to the cinema) & in object clauses, which express a future action simultaneous with that of the principle clause (I’ll do what you say. I’ll see what he does.

Moreover, the present tense is sometimes used to express past actions. It is known as the ‘historical’ or ‘dramatic’ present and is used to make past events more vivid, i.e. for stylistic purposes. E.g.: I enter the room & whom do you think I see? Your cousin Rachel!

We have seen thus that the present tense embraces actions taking place within different periods of time in the present, past & future. Hence, its meaning cannot be clearly defined. Therefore a number of modern grammarians state that the present tense is mainly understood from the opposition to the past tense. They use the term ‘non-past’ instead of the term ‘present’ tense (Barсhudarov). Considering the meaning of the past in’ historical present’ this term does not seem a good one either. Common tense would do better.

Barсhudarov states that, on the contrary, the meaning of the past tense can be clearly defined. It denotes an action which is prior to the moment of speaking & is not correlated with this moment (in this case the discrepancy with ‘historical present’ is gone as it may be seen as correlated with the present moment). Then the non-past denotes an action which is not past. & is outside the past time sphere. The past tense is the marked member of the opposition both semantically & formally, while the non-past (the present) is the unmarked member. The marked member of the opposition is singled out formally by the morpheme of the past tense. In regular verbs this is represented by the phonologically conditioned allomorphs [d, t, id] lived, worked, waited, & in irregular verbs by morphologically conditioned allomorphs & suppletive forms (sing-sang, speak-spoke, make-made, go-went).