tense,in grammar, a verbal category relating the time of a narrated event to the time of the speech event. In many languages the concept oftimeis expressed not by theverbbut by other parts of speech (temporal adverbials or even nouns, for example).
Time is frequently perceived as a continuum with three main divisions:past,present, andfuture. The past and future times are defined in relation to thepresent time (now).Past tenserefers to any time before the present time, andfuture tenserefers to any time after the present. Not all languages perceive this relationship as a linear one, nor do these categories characterize all possible times. Tense, then, is a grammatical expression of time reference. The correlation between tense and time is not necessarily one-to-one; languages do not recognize as many oppositions of tense as they have conceptions of time. English has past, present, and future times, but only a past and a nonpast opposition of tense.
