Whose tense is it, anyway?

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.

Here's an interesting discussion from the CALLE blog

The word tense is often mistakenly used to refer to time in general or for anything related to time within language. Tense is not time. It is merely a contrast between temporal references as explained above. A verb cannot have tense. Verbs alone are just words. Tense is an attribute of an utterance, and a verb outside of an utterance cannot express tense because there is nothing to compare it to. [My emphasis]

The professional linguists who write Language Log are not shy about using the word tense. It's common parlance in Linguistics at every level. What it means and how it's used, however, like some commonly used linguistic terms, is a matter of convention or adherence to a specific linguistic theory.

My understanding of tense from my MA courses in linguistics (also 30 years old and somewhat dated) is that tense is carried by the verb, which means that the morphemes that tell the reader/listener what tense the utterance is in are part of the verb or verb phrase. Prof John Lawler had no trouble talking about tense here a couple of weeks ago when he said that there were "only two tenses in English, past and present".

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

No. We (linguists, English teachers, and non-linguists -- i.e., most humans who talk about language) who talk about language usage use it all the time in informal discussions.

B. 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?

Even though many people use future as a name for one of the English tenses, there is no future tense in English, but it's still common parlance. These words are being used to describe the temporality of the action in the utterance. Aspect and mood are too technical for most people to use, but most of the high-level commentators here understand very well how to use those terms. Students of English are taught the meanings of those terms in their grammar books. They often (in Japan and Taiwan, at least) want to be talked to on that level.

While it's technically incorrect to say that, e.g., I will go to Japan tomorrow is in the future tense [will is a present tense verb form and go is an infinitive and so a tense-less form], that's what most people will say, and most will understand that it talks about the future. Some languages have one or more future tenses that are indicated by inflections attached to the verb or by other changes in the verb form.

C. 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?

I see no reason to avoid these common, traditional, and everday terms in our discussions on ELU. That's the way we talk about these questions. When you start writing theoretical papers for linguistics journals, you'll have to be careful about your terminology and will need to stipulate what you mean by every technical term. But anyone can look up the terms tense, aspect, mood, voice, etc., and have them reasonably well defined. It's not an issue for our discussions, I think, but strictly one for theoretical linguists.