Tenses of English

What is a Tense?

As pointed out by Klein (1995: 141), 2500 years of research have not led to any precise or universally acknowledged definition of the category 'tense'. However, there is a widespread understanding of what 'tense' basically means. Such an 'understood' definition is for instance given in the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (Bybee 1992: 223f.):

Tense refers to the grammatical expression of the time of the situation described in the proposition, relative to some other time. This other time may be the moment of speech, e. g. the past and future designate time before and after the moment of speech, respectively [...]. Tense is expressed by inflections, by particles, or by auxiliaries in construction with the verb [...].

Different Approaches

How many tenses are there in English? This is a simple question, to which, however, almost every linguist gives a different answer. According to Bublitz (1995: 135), these “dissenting views are reflected by the fact that linguists have yet to agree on the number of tenses [...] in English, which vary according to whether formal or semantic criteria or a combination of both are recognized. In particular, the present perfect, the past perfect and the future perfect defy easy categorization.” Linguists' different views on the number of English tenses can be grouped into four different approaches (cf. König 1995).

Two Tense Approach

Linguists who favor a binary approach argue that different tenses have to be distinguished morphologically, that is they have to be reflected in inflectional morphology. Accordingly, there are only two tenses, namely ‘past’ and ‘non-past’, as this is the only distinction that is reflected morphologically.

(1) He work - s.

(2) He work - ed.

All other categories of the English tense system are constituted by a combination of one of the two above-mentioned tenses with either a modal verb, or the perfect marker have. The advocates of this approach often conveniently stress the “combinatorial character” (König 1995: 154) of these members by naming them

• present perfect
• past perfect
• future perfect

rather than

• perfect
• pluperfect
• future II,

which might rather be used by linguists who recognize these as 'basic' tenses,. The binary approach is found in “many structuralist accounts” (König 1995: 154) such as the comprehensive grammar by Quirk et al. (1985).