The meaning of a phrase "marked for past tense/time"

Question

Hello, could someone explain me the meaning of a phrase "marked for past tense/time"?

Here are sentences with this phrase:

1. Only the modality can be marked for past tense; there is no independent past tense marking of the proposition. (From the book "Modality and the English modals" by F.R.Palmer)

2. With deontic modals neither the modality nor the proposition can be marked for past time. (the same grammar book from the different paragraph)

3. The auxiliary verb (did) is marked for past tense, but the main verb is not. It appears in its base form. (from https://learnersdictionary.com/qa/did-main-verb-base-form-or-past-tense-form)

I can only say that "marked for past tense/time" probably means something like "indicates past tense/time"

It's easy to understand such phrases like "marked for death/bad life", they can be paraphrased as something like "destined/intended for death/bad life". But "marked for past tense/time" has only 37 entries in english-corpora.org which is very few, so I think it isn't very common to say like that. Is it some kind of linguistic thing?

Thank you for your help!

AlpheccaStars · Accepted Answer

DVBC Is it some kind of linguistic thing?

Yes. Professions and disciplines have their own jargon, or language.

See "Tense marking" in this entry on Grammatical Tense:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_tense#Tense_marking

Tense is normally indicated by the use of a particular verb form – either an inflected form of the main verb, or a multi-word construction, or both in combination. Inflection may involve the use of affixes, such as the -ed ending that marks the past tense of English regular verbs, but can also entail stem modifications, such as ablaut, as found as in the strong verbs in English and other Germanic languages, or reduplication.

The meaning of a phrase "marked for past tense/time"

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