Tense and time
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Essentially, tense is a grammatical category, while time has to do with meaning. We can define tense as 'a system marked by verb inflection or auxiliaries whose basic use is to locate the situation in time'. For example, if I say Ed has a dog I'm using the present tense verb "has" to indicate that Ed has a dog as I speak.
- Essentially, tense is a grammatical category, while time has to do with meaning.
- We can define tense as 'a system marked by verb inflection or auxiliaries whose basic use is to locate the situation in time'.
- For example, if I say Ed has a dog I'm using the present tense verb "has" to indicate that Ed has a dog as I speak.
- He may not have owned a dog in the past, and he may not own one in the future, but right now at the time of my utterance, he does have a dog.
- And if I say Ed had a dog I'm using the past tense "had" to indicate that Ed had a dog at some time in the past relative to the time of my utterance, and it can be assumed that he doesn't have one now, and that we don't know if he will have one in the future.
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Essentially, tense is a grammatical category, while time has to do with meaning.
We can define tense as 'a system marked by verb inflection or auxiliaries whose basic use is to locate the situation in time'. For example, if I say
Ed has a dog
I'm using the present tense verb "has" to indicate that Ed has a dog as I speak. He may not have owned a dog in the pas
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