Time, Tense and Aspect

TIME, TENSE and ASPECT
TIME is a concept which is related to our perception of reality. There are three
manifestations of times: past, present (in constant motion!) and future. It is a
universal concept. Time passes.
TENSE is the grammatical or linguistic realization of time by means of verbal

inflection. It is a grammatical category which is marked by verb inflection and
expresses when an event or action happens in the flow of time. It is dependent
on particular languages. Languages may have up to three tenses: past,
present and future. (Latin: amabas – ama0s – amabis – one specific tense for
each time category)
Since the expression of future time does not involve any inflection of the verb
in present-day English, we do not refer to a "future tense". Therefore, there
are only two tenses in English: present and past.
Tense provides a temporal reference point for an utterance. It refers to the

absolute location of an event or action in time, either the present or the past.
It is marked by an inflection of the verb:
David walks to school (present tense)

David walked to school (past tense)
There is no inflectional marker to denote future time. Present day English has
options to refer to future time events. Reference to other times -- the future,
for instance -- can be made in a number of ways, by using the modal auxiliary
will, or the semi-auxiliary be going to:
David will walk to school tomorrow.

David is going to walk to school tomorrow.
Tense is a deictic category. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their
denotational meaning varies depending on time and/or place. Words or phrases that require
contextual information to convey any meaning -for example, pronouns (I / you), words
denoting place (here / there) and tenses are deictic in English.
There is no neat one-to-one correspondence between time and tense.
ASPECT indicates how time passes, or how an action unfolds within a

timeframe. This term refers to a grammatical category which reflects the way
in which the action denoted by the verbs is regarded or experienced with
respect to time. It indicates where or at which stage on the time axis we stand.
It refers to how an event or action is to be viewed with respect to time, rather
than to its actual location in time.
The aspect of a verb does not indicate when an action takes place in time; it
rather shows the relationship between the action and the passage of time as
seen from the speaker's point of view.
There are two aspects in English: the continuous (also called progressive)
aspect expresses duration; the perfect aspect expresses completion. The
combination of these two aspects makes the perfect continuous.
We can illustrate this using the following examples:
[1] David fell in love on his eighteenth birthday

[2] David has fallen in love
[3] David is falling in love
In [1], the verb fell tells us that David fell in love in the past, and specifically
on his eighteenth birthday. This is a simple past tense verb.
In [2] also, the action took place in the past, but it is implied that it took place
quite recently. Furthermore, it is implied that is still relevant at the time of
speaking -- David has fallen in love, and that's why he's behaving strangely. It
is worth noting that we cannot say *David has fallen in love on his eighteenth
birthday. The auxiliary has here encodes what is known as PERFECTIVE
ASPECT, and the auxiliary itself is known as the PERFECTIVE AUXILIARY.
In [3], the action of falling in love is still in progress -- David is falling in love
at the time of speaking. For this reason, we call it PROGRESSIVE ASPECT, and
the auxiliary is called the PROGRESSIVE AUXILIARY.
Aspect always includes tense. In [2] and [3] above, the aspectual auxiliaries
are in the present tense, but they could also be in the past tense:
David had fallen in love -- Perfective Aspect, Past Tense

David was falling in love -- Progressive Aspect, Past Tense
The perfective auxiliary is always followed by a main verb in the -ed form,
while the progressive auxiliary is followed by a main verb in the -ing form.
Interconnection / relationship of tense and aspect in verbs / verb groups to

separate in our minds these functional categories
- the morphological(inflectional) realization of tense
- the syntactic realization of aspect
TENSE ASPECT
Unmarked
Perfective Progressive
(simple?)
Present I fall has fallen is falling
Past I fell had fallen was falling
While aspect always includes tense, tense can occur without aspect (David falls
in love, David fell in love).

Time, Tense and Aspect

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TIME, TENSE and ASPECT

TENSE is the grammatical or linguistic realization of time by means of verbal

Tense provides a temporal reference point for an utterance. It refers to the

David walks to school (present tense)

David will walk to school tomorrow.

There is no neat one-to-one correspondence between time and tense.

ASPECT indicates how time passes, or how an action unfolds within a

We can illustrate this using the following examples:

[1] David fell in love on his eighteenth birthday

David had fallen in love -- Perfective Aspect, Past Tense

Interconnection / relationship of tense and aspect in verbs / verb groups to

- the morphological(inflectional) realization of tense

- the syntactic realization of aspect

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