[3] In recent work Maria Bittner and Judith Tonhauser have described the different ways in which tenseless languages nonetheless mark time.
In some contexts, however, their meaning may be relativized to a point in the past or future which is established in the discourse (the moment being spoken about).
Some languages have different verb forms or constructions which manifest relative tense, such as pluperfect ("past-in-the-past") and "future-in-the-past".
Verbs are also often conjugated for mood, and since in many cases the three categories are not manifested separately, some languages may be described in terms of a combined tense–aspect–mood (TAM) system.
[6] It is not related to the adjective tense, which comes from Latin tensus, the perfect passive participle of tendere, "stretch".
The category of aspect expresses how a state or action relates to time – whether it is seen as a complete event, an ongoing or repeated situation, etc.
In Latin and French, for example, the imperfect denotes past time in combination with imperfective aspect, while other verb forms (the Latin perfect, and the French passé composé or passé simple) are used for past time reference with perfective aspect.
As regards English, there are many verb forms and constructions which combine time reference with continuous and/or perfect aspect, and with indicative, subjunctive or conditional mood.
The phenomenon of fake tense is common crosslinguistically as a means of marking counterfactuality in conditionals and wishes.
Similarly, posterior tenses refer to the future relative to the time under consideration, as with the English "future-in-the-past": (he said that) he would go.
This can be thought of as a system where events are marked as prior or contemporaneous to points of reference on a timeline.
The conjugation patterns of verbs often also reflect agreement with categories pertaining to the subject, such as person, number and gender.
[20] The syntactic properties of tense have figured prominently in formal analyses of how tense-marking interacts with word order.
Some languages (such as French) allow an adverb (Adv) to intervene between a tense-marked verb (V) and its direct object (O); in other words, they permit [Verb-Adverb-Object] ordering.
In contrast, other languages (such as English) do not allow the adverb to intervene between the verb and its direct object, and require [Adverb-Verb-Object] ordering.
Latin terminology is often used to describe modern languages, sometimes with a change of meaning, as with the application of "perfect" to forms in English that do not necessarily have perfective meaning, or the words Imperfekt and Perfekt to German past tense forms that mostly lack any relationship to the aspects implied by those terms.
Latin verbs are inflected for tense and aspect together with mood (indicative, subjunctive, infinitive, and imperative) and voice (active or passive).
Sometimes, verb groups function as a unit and supplement inflection for tense (see Latin periphrases).
The paradigms for tenses in Ancient Greek are similar to the ones in Latin, but with a three-way aspect contrast in the past: the aorist, the perfect and the imperfect.
Modern Scottish Gaelic on the other hand only has past, non-past and 'indefinite', and, in the case of the verb 'be' (including its use as an auxiliary), also present tense.
Colloquially the perfect suffix -e can be added to past tenses to indicate that an action is speculative or reported (e.g. "it seems that he was doing", "they say that he was doing").
However, in South Slavic languages, there may be a greater variety of forms – Bulgarian, for example, has present, past (both "imperfect" and "aorist") and "future tenses", for both perfective and imperfective verbs, as well as perfect forms made with an auxiliary (see Bulgarian verbs).
Finnish and Hungarian, both members of the Uralic language family, have morphological present (non-past) and past tenses.
Korean verbs have a variety of affixed forms which can be described as representing present, past and future tenses, although they can alternatively be considered to be aspectual.
[30] eIPFV'āiketelearnnaDEIC'ōna3SiACCteINDEFtamarikichild/childrene 'āikete na 'ōna i te tamarikiIPFV learn DEIC 3S ACC INDEF child/children'He is teaching some children.
'kaPFVtunucooknaDEICou1SiACCteINDEFmīkakatarotongaallteINDEFpōpongimorningka tunu na ou i te mīkaka tonga te pōpongiPFV cook DEIC 1S ACC INDEF taro all INDEF morning'I used to cook taro every morning'[30] In Old Rapa there are also other types of tense markers known as Past, Imperative, and Subjunctive.
It is rarely used as a matrix TAM and is more frequently observed in past embedded clauses[30] iPSTkomosleepmātou1PL.EXCLi komo mātouPST sleep 1PL.EXCL'We slept.
aIMPravetakemaiDIRkāneiPRECtōDEFmeathinga rave mai kānei tō meaIMP take DIR PREC DEF thing'Please take the thing.
The postverbal morpheme liai and linia are the respective intransitive and transitive suffixes indicating a repeated action.
The postverbal morpheme li and liria are the respective intransitive and transitive suffixes indicating a completed action.