Indicating time references

In communication we sometimes give time references, and to do so, there are a number of possibilities from which a communicator has to choose. First of all, there are two tenses in English: the present and the past. For lexical verbs (not modals), the simple present is morphologically marked in the third person singular only, by the suffix –(e)s, and refers to the present time. It states that something exists or goes on at the time, e.g. “Here comes your mother” (Biber et al., 1999:454). It also describes present habitual behaviour: “She’s a vegetarian, but she eats chicken” (Biber et al., 1999:453). Moreover, the simple present is generic, and is thus used when something is true in the present, past and the

future, e.g. “John spends a lot of money” (Quirk et al., 1985:175ff). It is also the unmarked tense, in the sense that it is often represented by the base or uninflected form of the verb (except for in the third person singular and the verb be). Moreover, the simple present can refer to the future, e.g. if it is used in conditional or temporal adverbial clauses that have a future time reference. In narratives, it can also refer to past time. This is usually called ‘historic present’ and is used to make a story more vivid (Biber et al., 1999:454; Quirk et al., 1985:181f). The simple past refers to past time and is marked with the suffix -ed for regular verbs, as in “He walked on away from the green and the houses (...) from which Tace Way turned off” (Biber et al., 1999:454). The simple past tends to be used in fiction, both for narration and description, where it describes events that took place in an imaginary past.

Future time is expressed through the use of modal auxiliaries, semi- auxiliaries, the simple present or the present progressive (Quirk et al., 1985:213). Most commonly, modal auxiliary constructions with will, and with a first person subject sometimes shall, are used, e.g. “He will be here in half an hour” and “No doubt I shall see you next week” (Quirk et al., 1985:213). The present tense can also be used to refer to future events, e.g. if the verb is connected to a time adverbial, as in “School finishes on 21st _{March”, and in}

dependent clauses, after conditional and temporal conjunctions such as if and when, e.g. “What will you say if I marry the boss?” (Quirk et al., 1985:216). Futurity is also expressed by means of be going to + the infinitive, as in “When are you going to get married?”, with the implicit meaning “future fulfilment of present intention” (Quirk et al., 1985:214), and in “It’s going to rain”, with the implicit meaning “future result of present cause” (Quirk et al., 1985:214). There are also two quasi-auxiliaries that are used to express future time: be to + infinitive, often indicating that there is a future arrangement or plan, and be about to + infinitive, used for near future. Examples would be “Their daughter is to be married soon” and “The train is about to leave” (Quirk et al., 1985:217).

Apart from tense, aspect is also expressed in the verb phrase. Biber et al. (1999:460) describe aspect as having to do with the ”completion or lack of completion of events or states described by a verb”. The perfect aspect is used for “events or states taking place during a period leading up to the specified time” (Biber et al., 1999:460). The progressive aspect is used for “an event or state of affairs which is in progress, or continuing, at the time indicated by the rest of the verb phrase” (Biber et al., 1999:460). The two aspects can be combined with tense, which gives us the present perfect and the past perfect, and the present progressive and the past progressive. The present perfect is

used for situations that started in the past and continue to exist until the present, e.g. “So far, the newspaper has ignored my letters to the press”.5 _The

past perfect is used to describe situations that took place before a specific past time, e.g. “Until yesterday, I had never seen a penguin”. An example of the present progressive would be “Where’s Jake? He’s hiding in the closet”. The past progressive is used in the sentence “Jake was pleased that no one could see him while he was hiding in the closet”.

Harder (1994:62f) suggests that the tenses can be organised in a way that reflects their relation to a basic time, which is either the present or the past. The choice of either present or past is seen as the only obligatory choice, and once a clause is anchored in one of them, a point of reference has arisen from which more, optional, steps can be taken in order to build other tenses. Harder (1994:62) identifies three sub-paradigms:

[present (S) / past (P)] [+/- future] F

[+/- perfect] A

With a point of reference in either the present or the past, the three sub- paradigms can be combined to form eight different tense categories:

Simple present S he plays Simple past P he played Present future S + F he will play Past future P + F he would play Present perfect S + A he has played Past perfect P + A he had played Present future perfect S + F + A he will have played Past future perfect P + F + A he would have played (from Harder 1996:396)

In this section, aspect has been described as a way of indicating the degree of completion in any verb event, and as such it can also be referred to as grammatical aspect.

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