Talk:Grammatical tense/Archive 1

Comparison Table

Given that its purpose is for comparison, couldn't we have picked a slavic language with a roman alphabet? Croatian and Polish come to mind. It would make comparison much easier than trying to remember how to read cyrillic... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.12.244.244 (talk) 13:00, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

I find the entire comparison table flawed, even to the point of being offensively Eurocentric. Why these particular languages? Are they representative of human languages in general? If geography gives any clue, absolutely not. Why no subjunctives? Even if subjunctives were included, these seven example languages would be grossly inadequate. Perhaps the entire table should be removed, unless someone is willing to undertake the heavy burden of improving it. 206.127.2.114 (talk) 21:54, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Heated discussion on English Grammatical Tense

Has been moved to Talk:English grammar by me, along with all the controversial content of the page. Let's keep the generic Grammatical tense page for non-English controversies. By the way, could an op now please remove the "Disputed" tag? I think the remaining parts are no longer disputed.

Steverapaport 10:10, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

English-centered?

Shouldn't a general article about 'grammatical tense' be somewhat less English-centered? Or is this article intended to be about the grammatical tense system of the English language? Strangeloop (talk) 12:40, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Absolutely! In fact I contend that everything after the table of English tenses should be removed to the English grammar article. The table itself should include at least 2 more languages. The controversy below it is relevant to an article on English Grammar, but not to the Grammatical Tense topic.

Steverapaport

Ok, I've looked at the English grammar topic and it's definitely got a better place for the discussion on English Verb Tenses. Would anyone mind if I moved the discussion (the part after the table of English tenses) to that article, and also the parts of the above dispute that go with it to the Talk:English grammar talk page?

This would free the article on "Grammatical tense" from its EPOV and allow it to talk instead in NPOV about tense in general.

If I don't hear back within 24 hours I may give this a try.

Steverapaport 11:17, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Cool, thanks for fixing! Do you know WikiProject Countering Systemic Bias? Especially the Linguistics section is relevant in this case (listing more articles suffering from LPOV/EPOV), but you might also find other aspects of the project interesting. — mark ✎ 08:11, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Good idea, Mark. I fixed Inflection up a bit thanks to your suggestion.

Steverapaport 10:01, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Wow, that's fast. Good work on Inflection. If you know of other articles (linguistic or otherwise) that suffer from the systemic bias of Wikipedia, please considering adding them to the open tasks; and you might also want to consider subscribing as a participant... Regards, — mark ✎ 13:02, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Again, thanks for the suggestion, Mark! I've registered and participated a bit. Regards, Steverapaport 22:57, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I suggest emphasis on the definition of a tense e.g. the relation of the action to the present. By this definition, the table should be seriously revised or cut entirely. Usual English "tenses" are conjugation paradigms combining Aspect and Tense. They have no relation to actual grammatical tenses. that table would better fit something like Conjugation or Tense(conjugation), IMHO.--Circeus 02:01, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

In defense of being "English-centered"

Given that this article is written in English for English speakers, I think it's entirely appropriate that it focuses on English and other European languages, which are the languages that English-speaking students in the U.S., U.K., Canada and elsewhere are most likely to study.

An article or section focusing on tenses in non-European languages, if someone has the information and time to put one together, would also be useful. 76.21.8.213 (talk) 17:31, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

It can be disputed.

As a matter of fact, a great number of scholars dispute (or actually refute) the existence of the Future tense in English, arguing for the binary nature of the English tense system, i.e. they say there is a past tense and a non-past tense.

Consider:

What we call "future tense" is not inflected for the future, whereas past tense(s) have morphology on them, just as the present is marked either by a "zero-morpheme" (i.e. nothing), or by the -s suffix. (At least in standard dialects.) All in all, tenses in English are reflected by morphology, while the Future tense(?) (will/shall ...) is a syntactic way of expressing tense.

It is disputed whether we should refer to e.g. Past Perfect and Past Continuous as two distinct tenses or they are rather two aspects, but the very same tense.

The modal auxiliary will/shall has other meanings too. E.g. It can express insistence, volition, probability, and some people say this modal usage is the origin of its "future" application.

All things considered, what is certain is that the English tense system is far from being unambiguous, and this is not reflected, but only referred to in the article. Therefore it may well be justified to stick to the word disputed.

I'm not quite sure what your point is, but I have the feeling that a general article about how languages express temporality is not the best place for a discussion about English grammatical terminology. I think English grammar would be a better place to adress these issues. — mark ✎ 23:25, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

We should not centrate on defining how is a tense marked, but on it's definition. IMHO, we should point both opinions on the Future. The fact remains: english 'distinguishes' a future tense from a present and a past one.--Circeus 01:50, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Ok all points of view have been neutrally mentioned. (See the article) Can we stop disputing now? I feel silly having a "disputed" tag on articles like this. If nobody objects I will remove the tag tomorrow.

Steverapaport 14:35, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

This article should read like the picture on the front cover of National Geographic

Can we get rid of as much of the English (it has no future!) examples as possible? We can stick a pointer to 'English grammar' and have it all there, but this article should be more theoretical. It's difficult to separate the semantics from morphology here. I think tense and aspect are both fundamentally to do with time. Proto-Semitic 'tenses' tend to cover the area of Indo-European 'aspect'. So, I see 'tense' as being the major interpretation of time, and 'aspect' adding further detail. There's far too much Indo-European stuff here. We should have a discussion on tense semantics - what kind of distinctions are made in language. Then we should go into the mechanics (sytax/morphology), and stress that inflexion tense is only one way of playing the game. This would touch on tense-aspect inflexion in Indo-European, but should also deal with other complicating factors. Perhaps we should end with noun tense (as in Japanese). Any thoughts?

Gareth Hughes 00:11, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps we should start by talking about temporal deixis (the stuff on spatial tense is really talking about spatial deixis), the reference to time in language. Discuss the distinction between semantic deixis and the structural tense. I think that it is important to discuss the 'utterance point' (the time of writing/speaking) and 'narrative point' (the time of reference) - absolute tenses make a concrete reference to the utterance point, relative tenses make reference to narrative point (which must be understood by an absolute context). Most languages that allow these distinctions also allow for hybrid, absolute-relative tenses. Perhaps it's useful to note that tense is a feature of a phrase, and is usually marked by one (or more) words in that phrase. Syntactically, the verb is the most common (and obvious?) candidate for tense marking. However, some languages mark nouns with tense. Is it reasonable to describe 'aspect' as a secondary temporal category, rather than define it as momentary/continuous etc?

It would be good if we had a few people contribute information on the tense systems of various non-IE languages, so that we can go for the broad and universal here.

Gareth Hughes 20:30, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

That sounds very good. I'd think we need a big sample of data from various languages first; when writing the article, the best examples can be picked. I'm saying this because I guess we don't want the article to become a big heap of data from as much languages as possible; nevertheless, we do need such a big heap to pick the best examples from. So data collected here might or might not end up in the actual article. What do you think?

I'll be able to dig into Suppyire (Gur>Senufo, Mali), Iraqw (Southern Cushitic, Kenia), EKoti (Bantu, Mozambique), and Swahili shortly. I'll also keep my eyes open for any interesting phenomena related to this subject. — mark ✎ 21:05, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Just a thought: I wonder how much info on tense systems can be gleaned from WP articles. Would it be a good idea to copy and paste it here, and see what we end up with?

Gareth Hughes 21:19, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Sure. Although the red links above will be WP articles pretty soon (but maybe not this year :) ). I'll look around in the African corner to see if we have something already. — mark ✎ 21:31, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Possible candidates so far (after browsing through the full Category:Niger-Congo languages and its subcategories, as well as Mustafaa's list): Soddo language, Gimira language, Gbe languages. I hope to find more tomorrow. — mark ✎ 22:26, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I suggest that we start collecting tense info at Grammatical tense/multilingual sources.

Gareth Hughes 23:49, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

This all sounds good, although I'd be happier if the Indo-European stuff stuck around as a section. Most of the readers of en.wikipedia do in fact speak one or more Indo-European languages and many of them are young people on school assignment, who may want some concrete examples. Of course making the article a more complete survey of tense in general, in all known languages, is a big yes. And if the "English has no future" people will kindly settle down and argue in the English grammar pages, I won't object to removing the crap I added for them.

Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater is all.

Steverapaport 09:58, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

It looks like you've had a tough time trying to get this article in order. I wasn't suggesting that IE material be removed completely. However, grammar articles here are so heavily biased towards IE that it's going to take some effort correcting the imbalance. I imagine that the article should start with some universal theory on grammatical tense. This could then be followed by discussion of individual tense features with examples from a broad range of languages (using English or traditionally 'familiar' languages only where explication is needed, or where that language is exemplary). Then it would be good to review trends of tense systems according to language families, and I would hope that there would be a good opportunity to do IE tense then. Rather than the baby and bathwater anology, I think it's the cart and horse idea: we need to define universally before we can discuss what any one language does with it. Is it possible?

Gareth Hughes 12:51, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I think the latest versions look a lot like your ideal now, Gareth. Is this good enough now? Many thanks to Ish and all the other contributors who made this happen. Steve Rapaport 22:35, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Conditional

What about the conditional tense and the past conditional tense? Should they be included? Sotakeit 16:51, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

englishtense.com

Well, see that website for some info on English tense (summary removed, not necessary). — mark ✎ 12:56, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

Multilingual sources

See /multilingual sources for an old subpage of this article. — mark ✎ 12:54, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

Relative Example in "Classification"

It seems to me that the example given for a relative tense is really another example of relative-absolute, where 'saw' indicates that the narrative is past from an absolute perspective, while the strolling is then moved to the time of that action, which, though not specified exactly, is neverthelss absolutely past.

Manicsleeper : Tuesday, 2006-08-08 23:01 UTC

Near future

I humble suggest adding near future to your table of tenses, which in English is "is going to" and is also used in several other languages shown on your table.

You're right. However "going to" structures are grammatically present continuous. You'd write "be going to" more precisely as it doesn't refer to people. By the way, what else languages use this apart from French? Ferike333 (talk) 18:02, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

TMA chart

I don't understand the chart. "Do" is the example verb? Then why are the example markers "-ed" and "-en" rather than "ablaut/-d" and "-ne" or something like that? Are "-ed" and "-en" taken to be the prototypic forms? Wouldn't it be better to have a chart with some different strong and weak verbs to show different ways of marking verb forms? I'm no linguist. Cyrusc 18:46, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

• I did a little more reading--so "Have + -en" and "be + -ing" are actually the names of English aspects? E.g. "has walked" is the have + -en aspect of "walk"? Is that right? Cyrusc 19:07, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

I think the chart is horrid, it looks like something from the era of slide rules. How about this instead?

see Lemma

Tense	Modal	Aspect
		Perfect	Progressive
LEMMA (nonpast) LEMMA-ed (past)	will LEMMA (future)	<span="float:left">have LEMMA-en (perfect)  <span="float:right;">be LEMMA-ing (progressive)

By the way, it doesn't name the aspects of english grammar, it demonstrates them. So it is:

To DO

• I did (I /do +ed/) - past tense
• I do - nonpast tense
• I will do - future
• I have done (I have /do +en/) - perfect
• I am doing (I /be/ doing) - continuous

The difference between tense, modal, and aspect is that: tense changes the time in the phrase by inflection on the verb, modal adds an auxiliary to the verb to change the phrase (mnemonic: the presence of the auxiliary “changes the mode”), and the aspect uses both inflection and an auxiliary.

— robbiemuffin ^{page talk} 23:24, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Present Habitual

Anyone heard of the Present Habitual tense? Irish is the only language in which I've seen it. It has influenced Hiberno-English, so Irish people have two ways of saying 'I am.' 'I am here' is used if I'm standing here right now. To say 'I am here every day' an Irishman says 'I be here every day.' If it's someone else he'll say "he be's here every day." I think this tense is worth adding. --Eamonnca1 01:42, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

I've read the same thing happening in an English dialect. Probably in New Founland English, but I'm unsure. In Hungarian we have a structure for that but it isn't a verb tense. If it exists in Irish, then it might exist in Scottish (hope I wrote the right one, always change with Scots) or Welsh. Ferike333 (talk) 21:00, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Present perfect tense

I added present perfect tense to the list of tenses. I'm not sure the description is correct. SharkD (talk) 02:15, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Nevermind. SharkD (talk) 07:32, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

"Weasel words" in English basic tense section

Can we work to disambiguate this section. Does anyone know the origin of the 'two tenses' argument? I'm thinking Michael Halliday, but I'm not sure. It could be reworded to something like "Michael Halliday, in his influential systemic functional grammar, put forward the view that English has only two tenses by which verbs are inflected, the nonpast tense (present tense) and the past tense (indicated by ablaut or ending in -ed)."

Like I say, I don't know the details. But many well-regarded linguists accept this model and it deserves a (properly cited) mention. - Snookerfran (talk) 02:32, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

The suggestion I made above wasn't very clear or helpful. Sorry! One way to get rid of the first 'weasel word' tag would be to remove the words 'According to some linguists'. English DOES have only two tenses by which verbs are inflected; this does not need qualifying. The controversy owes to the definition of tense, and whether or not it is dependent on the inflection of verbs. We need citations to linguistic models which use differing descriptions of tense in describing English grammar. - Snookerfran (talk) 01:01, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Estaba yendo

I don't believe Spanish speakers ever say, "(Yo) estaba yendo." Estaba is from estar, a verb cognate with English stand or state (cf. Estados Unidos and "United States"). Estar normally cannot be used with a verb of motion, such as ir (prp. yendo). The correct way to say, "I was going," in Spanish should, I think, be (Yo) iba. 76.21.8.213 (talk) 17:38, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF VERB TENSE???????

user:24.9.244.62 asked this question on the top of the article page, I have moved it here, but I fear that the question may be overly vague. English is probably not his/her first language. — PhilHibbs | talk 14:09, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, this is hard to answer because some languages, such as Chinese, have no verb tenses just one "tense" and adverbs (something like: formerly, now, later) to describe when it happens. In most Indo-European languages there are verb tenses. They basically describe if the happening is in the past, present or in the future. My language, Hungarian (which is not Indo-European) has three tenses, past, present, future, however formerly used to have more. In German there are two tenses that describe a happening in the past. The usage simply depends whether you write or speak, or how formal you are, or where you live. In English it is much more complicated. There are numerous tenses and we are taught difficult rules when to use which, however their usage is regionally variable. If you're still here, it might be easier to explain if you told me what your native language is. Cheers, Ferike333 (talk) 19:20, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Why is ir used as the verb for Spanish examples?

Considering that it's irregular, it doesn't really make for good examples. Zeldafanjtl (talk) 02:30, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Just looking over the page, I realized that the same verb was used for all languages. However, I think we should find a different verb that is not irregular in any of the example languages. Zeldafanjtl (talk) 02:34, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Maybe, we should, maybe we shouldn't. I think the verb go is irregular in almost all languages but is a basic, often used verb. It's irregular in English (go), German (gehen), French (aller) and Spanish (ir) must be, too, if you say, however I don't speak unfortunately, and even our Hungarian jönni is irregular, too, however jár, which also means go in English is regular. And haven't mentioned yet that Russian has more words for go, the mentioned one, идти idti and хотеть hotet’, the meanings of which are different. Hungarian járni (+ illative, sublative or allative) equals Russian хотеть hotet’ (+ most preposition + akkusative) and German besuchen (+ accusative) in some senses. Идти (idti) can mean both come and go. So this verb I think is one of the most complicated of all. Sincererly, Ferike333 (talk) 20:11, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

French examples

I corrected some of the French examples in the example chart, on the ground of them being completly wrong (neither « je suis en allant » and « j'ai allé » are valid in standard French) (I'm a native speaker, in case of doubt). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.48.112.204 (talk) 09:33, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

This article is an absolute mess!

Tense is a very simple concept and has a simple explanation that is universal throughout all languages. This article cannot even manage to separate tense from aspect and even in some cases mixes in mood! The perfect/progressive/continuous/aorist or any of that are not tenses. This needs an entire rewrite.

This article is nothing but a jumble of poorly referenced research and examples that cover a wide range or temporal attributes of language. Articles like this create so many problems because students read them and then accept them as fact, and then professors to spend hours trying to unteach this rubbish. --Drew.ward (talk) 16:44, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

Looking at the article I'm thinking it's received your (partial) rewrite. However there are some pretty bald assertions which sound like the new author was overreacting to the original content ("In many texts the term tense may erroneously indicate qualities of..."). Can we get some adjustment of language and/or sourcing; for example when asserting that tense does not include a certain arrangement of concepts that many texts mistakenly assign to it, it would be nice to know on what authority this is based, and what kind of texts we're referring to. Penumbra 2k (talk) 06:58, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

Expression of tense in various languages

I think that the notes should be moved from the table to footnotes at the end of the section. As they are, they're hard to read, and make the table rows unnecessarily tall.--Jcvamp (talk) 13:01, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Dutch

Dutch example in the text Ik was aan het gaan geweest. How very odd. I'm a native speaker of Dutch, and that's definitely not correct Dutch! Sjorskingma (talk) 19:03, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I am also a native Dutch speaker and surely it is grammatically correct, though it just sounds odd as this (past) tense is almost never used in Dutch (unlike the present form: "ben aan het (...) geweest"), especially not with verb "gaan". "was aan het werken geweest" or "was aan het denken geweest" for instance sound much more normal. But you can google the above sentences: there are a few google hits. PS: if you take the present tense "ben aan het denken geweest" you start getting a lot of hits. ScalaDiSeta (talk) 22:01, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Grobalize

This covers - well - English. It is not fitted to actually explain most other Indo-European languages at all well; but it really should make the attempt. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:38, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

It explains all languages just fine (well, apart from being generally awful); the problem is that you do not accept the modern linguistic definition of "tense". But your point is valid nonetheless: we should note that traditional approaches include aspect within "tense".

(Unless, of course, you actually know of a tense which is not included in the article.) — kwami (talk) 06:47, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Split into two articles?

Based on my reading of the article and the above discussion, it seems to me that the key problem with the article is that it is about two different things -- linguistic tense (when the action takes place) and traditional language-specific grammarians' "tense" (meaning verb structure). Regardless of whether using tense in the latter sense is wrong or simply an alternative usage, these are two different things which both deserve encyclopedia articles. But I don't see why they should share the same article.

I suggest that there should be two articles: this one, perhaps retitled Tense (linguistics) and with the table of "tense" forms deleted, and a new article entitled something like "Verb forms", containing the table of "tense" forms as well as accompanying discussion including comparisons across languages.

Comments anyone? 75.183.96.242 (talk) 16:43, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Tenses in the linguistic sense are also (usually) verb forms, so I don't see a dichotomy here. Also, the latter would be a huge, sprawling article: with mood, aspect, evidentiality, person, number, gender, case roles, transitivity, voice, polarity, and god knows what else. — kwami (talk) 16:56, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

In that case, I would suggest two wording changes in the section "Expression of tense in various languages": (1) The first sentence begins "Examples of tense expression in some Indo-European and Finno-Ugric tenses...." The last word here, "tenses", does not conform to the linguistic meaning of tense but rather to the traditional grammarian's meaning. How about replacing this passage with "Examples of tense expression in some Indo-European and Finno-Ugric verbal constructions [or, verbal forms]"? (2) The heading of the first column of the table should not be "Tense", but rather "Tense/Aspect combination". 75.183.96.242 (talk) 19:02, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

The newly modified version says "in some Indo-European and Finno-Ugric inflections of verbs". But the table includes non-inflectional forms such as "I will go". So I think something like "verb forms" would be more accurate than "inflections of verbs". 75.183.96.242 (talk) 22:31, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

You're right.

You can edit it yourself, you know! — kwami (talk) 22:49, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Too Indo-European-centric

Examples in section Other languages consider the following:

• skip Swedish and Dutch – that many Germanic languages are not needed, besides, Germanic languages are fairly uncomplicated regarding tense and too similar to English,
• for the same reason, skip one two of Italian, Portuguese and French, skip one of Bulgarian and Macedonian,
• add a few weirdmost known languages regarding tense, Afroasiatic ones are known to be very advanced, I think...

Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 20:26, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Expand on the Indo-European Languages if you're going to talk about them that much. Also, examples of some tense verbs for major languages would help as well. Do other asian languages follow similar tense patterns? Or do they differ with the various regions they are apart of? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Smwong2 (talk • contribs) 06:57, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

"In many languages, such as the Latin, Celtic and Slavic languages, a verb may be inflected for both tense and aspect together"

As far as I know, in Slavic languages verbs are not considered to be inflected for aspects; instead, every verb belongs to either of the two aspects - "perfective" or "imperfective", with irregular means to derive perfective verbs from imperfective ones, and vice versa. - 91.122.4.198 (talk) 20:06, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

That would then be another way of saying the same thing particular to the slavicist grammarian tradition. In general linguistics it doesn't make any sense to say that a verb belongs to an aspect. It is a form of inflection in any case.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 20:16, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

References by section

The sections "Uses of the term", "Tense marking", and "In particular languages" contain only one or two references each, but each section includes a wide range of information. Please add in-line citations of reliable sources, both for current content and for any additions. Cnilep (talk) 03:49, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

Diagrams needed

This article could use a diagram to help explain the various tenses, especially the complicated ones like pluperfect and future-in-the-past. Examples of copyrighted versions of this:

• https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/91/55/5e/91555e4d518f69e8e867b4226f18b66b.gif
• http://www.luizotaviobarros.com/2011/09/timelines-verb-tenses.html

-- Beland (talk) 18:22, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

Nonpresent tense

Where is nonpresent tense?! I know some languages that use present and nonpresent tenses. Also Ithkuil use nonpresent with both past and future, so it have at least four tenses (present, nonpresent, future and past). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.206.60.119 (talk) 15:05, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

Ithkuil has four tenses, but future and past aren't tenses in ithkuil, they are aspects used with nonpresent tense. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.206.55.31 (talk) 03:36, 20 January 2022 (UTC)