terminology - Whose tense is it, anyway?

I have questions which perhaps should be posted to Linguistics.SE; but since my primary concern is to discover what terminology in discussing English grammar and usage on ELU (and in similar contexts), I hope I may be allowed to post them here.

Back in the early ‘60s, when I was learning to distinguish tense, aspect and mood in Latin and English, it was explained to me that (despite what the schoolmarms were telling me) I should regard these categories as attributes not of verbs but of entire sentences, realized in Latin primarily through verbal inflection but in English mostly through constructions employing a variety of lexical and syntactic components.

This way of thinking about the categories has always made sense to me, and it is echoed here and there in my old Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (Lyons, 1968). For instance:

Tense is therefore a deictic category, which […] is simultaneously a property of the sentence and the utterance. (305)

In recent years, however, I have on several occasions been chided for using the term tense in this manner. I am told that it is properly applied only in cases where temporal reference is expressed through inflection. I have not been made aware of any similar restriction in the use of aspect or mood.

I am painfully aware that my understanding of English grammar and syntax is by now two generations out of date. So I’d like to ask:

• Is the term tense today only properly used in the restricted sense, in formal discourse about English grammar?


• Does this restriction similarly apply to 1) such terms of tense-distinction as past, present and future, and 2) the parallel categories aspect and mood and their corresponding terms of distinction?


• In cases where such restrictions apply, what terms should be used to name the categories and distinctions when they are expressed through some means other than inflection of a verb?

Answer

I’m Drew Ward, the linguist who wrote the linked to pages on the CALLE site. This debate over the use of the word tense has been something that’s been coming up quite a bit lately and perhaps reflects a change in recent years among university professors in what they are and are not teaching students. A few years ago the challenge with the term tense was that it was being used too broadly to refer to anything and everything “temporal” (including aspect and such). The problem today seems to be the polar opposite and is just as full of problems. As mentioned above, the current popular approach is to limit the use of the word tense to only those situations in which verb morphology is inflected to convey time information.

This view unfortunately can’t work. In fact, if you applied this sort of thinking to English, not only would we not have future tenses, but we’d have neither past nor present tenses either. Expression of verbal information in English requires two functional units working together (usually an auxiliary + a specific subordinate form — for instance aspect requires either DO+VERB or BE+VERBing). Tense is expressed via combination of the verb form of the left-most auxiliary in a verb construction (whatever auxiliary is nearest the subject) in tandem with some temporal adverbial which can be either explicit (tomorrow, yesterday, at 3pm, this one time when I was a kid) or implicit via context or logical order.

No verb form in English can be called an X-tense form because none of them have only that function. However, there are three general forms that tend to be default verb forms for expressing tense. The first form (usually called present tense form) is unmarked for tense and used for expressing certainty. Examples include “I am typing now (present tense)”, “Santa Claus comes tonight (future tense)”. Absent of additional time-marking (explicit or implicit), this form defaults to “present”.

The second form is the praeterite. The praeterite is traditionally called “the past tense” form but this is only one of its functions. The praeterite can be used to express the certain past (indicative) or the uncertain present (subjunctive). Like the unmarked certain form, absent of other time-marking or mood-marking, the default for the praeterite is “past tense”.

The third form (often referred to as “future tense form” is the unmarked uncertain form, or unmarked modal. This form can be used to express any tense as allowed by the modal used (can, may, might, have, must, be able, be going, etc.). The big difference with this form is that the argument of the verb is uncertain and generally relies on some added qualification as denoted by the modal used for whatever is attested to to come to fruition. Modal forms generally express either present or future tenses and again do so with some added implicit or explicit time marking. Absent of additional temporal marking though, the default tense for this form tends to be future.

This debate in general comes down to petty arguments over terminology, but since tense is nothing more than a way of describing temporal contrast as the relative position and distance of two temporal references along the timeline of an utterance, and those range from far distant past to far distant future (with the only “single tense” being present which is always an ever-changing point “now”), to say that any language has more or fewer tenses than any other is honestly asinine if not in the least just closed-minded and ignorant. If we as human beings can talk about future, we have future tenses (same for present and past). How that information is conveyed though may be drastically different from one language to the next.