Tenses
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Tenses
In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference. Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their conjugation patterns. The main tenses found in many languages include the past, present, and future. Some languages have only two distinct tenses, such as past and nonpast, or future and nonfuture. There are also tenseless languages, like most of the Chinese languages, though they can possess a future and nonfuture system typical of Sino-Tibetan languages. In recent work Maria Bittner and Judith Tonhauser have described the different ways in which tenseless languages nonetheless mark time. On the other hand, some languages make finer tense distinctions, such as remote vs recent past, or near vs remote future. Tenses generally express time relative to the moment of speaking. In some contexts, however, their meaning may be relativized to a point in the past or future which is established in the discourse (the moment being ...
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Tenseless Language
In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference. Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their conjugation patterns. The main tenses found in many languages include the past, present, and future. Some languages have only two distinct tenses, such as past and nonpast, or future and nonfuture. There are also tenseless languages, like most of the Chinese languages, though they can possess a future and nonfuture system typical of Sino-Tibetan languages. In recent work Maria Bittner and Judith Tonhauser have described the different ways in which tenseless languages nonetheless mark time. On the other hand, some languages make finer tense distinctions, such as remote vs recent past, or near vs remote future. Tenses generally express time relative to the moment of speaking. In some contexts, however, their meaning may be relativized to a point in the past or future which is established in the discourse (the moment being ...
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Latin Conjugation
In terms of linguistics and grammar, conjugation has two basic meanings. One meaning is the creation of derived forms of a verb from basic forms, or principal parts. It may be affected by person, number, gender, tense, mood, aspect, voice, or other language-specific factors. The second meaning of the word conjugation is a group of verbs which all have the same pattern of inflections. Thus all those Latin verbs which have 1st singular -ō, 2nd singular -ās, and infinitive -āre are said to belong to the 1st conjugation, those with 1st singular -eō, 2nd singular -ēs and infinitive -ēre belong to the 2nd conjugation, and so on. The number of conjugations of regular verbs is usually said to be four. The word "conjugation" comes from the Latin , a calque of the Greek (''syzygia''), literally "yoking together (horses into a team)". For simple verb paradigms, see the Wiktionary appendix pages for first conjugation, second conjugation, third conjugation, and fourth conjugation. ...
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Past Tense
The past tense is a grammatical tense whose function is to place an action or situation in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs ''sang'', ''went'' and ''washed''. Most languages have a past tense, with some having several types in order to indicate how far back the action took place. Some languages have a compound past tense which uses auxiliary verbs as well as an imperfect tense which expresses continuous or repetitive events or actions. Some languages inflect the verb, which changes the ending to indicate the past tense, while non-inflected languages may use other words, such as "yesterday" or "last week" etc to indicate that something took place in the past. Introduction In some languages, the grammatical expression of past tense is combined with the expression of other categories such as grammatical aspect (see tense–aspect). Thus a language may have several types of past tense form, their use depending on what aspectual or other addi ...
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Latin Grammar
Latin is a heavily inflected languages, inflected language with largely free word order. Nouns are inflected for grammatical number, number and grammatical case, case; pronouns and adjectives (including participles) are inflected for number, case, and grammatical gender, gender; and verbs are inflected for grammatical person, person, number, grammatical tense, tense, grammatical aspect, aspect, grammatical voice, voice, and grammatical mood, mood. The inflections are often changes in the ending of a word, but can be more complicated, especially with verbs. Thus verbs can take any of over 100 different endings to express different meanings, for example "I rule", "I am ruled", "to rule", "to be ruled". Most verbal forms consist of a single word, but some tenses are formed from part of the verb "I am" added to a participle; for example, "I was led" or "he is going to lead". Nouns belong to one of three grammatical gender, genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter). The gender ...
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Grammatical Aspect
In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, as denoted by a verb, extends over time. Perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to any flow of time during ("I helped him"). Imperfective aspect is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or repetitively as time flows ("I was helping him"; "I used to help people"). Further distinctions can be made, for example, to distinguish states and ongoing actions ( continuous and progressive aspects) from repetitive actions ( habitual aspect). Certain aspectual distinctions express a relation between the time of the event and the time of reference. This is the case with the perfect aspect, which indicates that an event occurred prior to (but has continuing relevance at) the time of reference: "I have eaten"; "I had eaten"; "I will have eaten". Different languages make different grammatical aspectual distinctions; ...
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Grammatical Aspect
In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, as denoted by a verb, extends over time. Perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to any flow of time during ("I helped him"). Imperfective aspect is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or repetitively as time flows ("I was helping him"; "I used to help people"). Further distinctions can be made, for example, to distinguish states and ongoing actions ( continuous and progressive aspects) from repetitive actions ( habitual aspect). Certain aspectual distinctions express a relation between the time of the event and the time of reference. This is the case with the perfect aspect, which indicates that an event occurred prior to (but has continuing relevance at) the time of reference: "I have eaten"; "I had eaten"; "I will have eaten". Different languages make different grammatical aspectual distinctions; ...
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Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the Roman Republic it became the dominant language in the Italian region and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. Even after the fall of Western Rome, Latin remained the common language of international communication, science, scholarship and academia in Europe until well into the 18th century, when other regional vernaculars (including its own descendants, the Romance languages) supplanted it in common academic and political usage, and it eventually became a dead language in the modern linguistic definition. Latin is a highly inflected language, with three distinct genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), six or seven noun cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, and vocative), five declensions, four verb conjuga ...
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Future Tense
In grammar, a future tense (abbreviated ) is a verb form that generally marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future. An example of a future tense form is the French ''aimera'', meaning "will love", derived from the verb ''aimer'' ("love"). The "future" expressed by the future tense usually means the future relative to the moment of speaking, although in contexts where relative tense is used it may mean the future relative to some other point in time under consideration. English does not have an inflectional future tense, though it has a variety of grammatical and lexical means for expressing future-related meanings. These include modal auxiliaries such as ''will'' and ''shall'' as well as the futurate present tense. Expressions The nature of the future, necessarily uncertain and at varying distances ahead, means that the speaker may refer to future events with the modality either of probability (what the speaker expec ...
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Relative And Absolute Tense
Relative tense and absolute tense are distinct possible uses of the grammatical category of tense. Absolute tense means the grammatical expression of time reference (usually past, present or future) relative to "now" – the moment of speaking. In the case of relative tense, the time reference is construed relative to a different point in time, the moment being considered in the context. In other words, the reference point (or center of deixis) is the moment of discourse or narration in the case of absolute tense, or a different moment in the case of relative tense. A further distinction has also been made between "strict relative" tense, which merely expresses time relative to the reference point, and "absolute-relative tense" (such as pluperfect), which expresses time relative to the reference point while also placing the reference point in time relative to the present moment.Comrie (1985), p. 64. A relative past tense is sometimes called an anterior tense, while a relative futur ...
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Imperfect
The imperfect (abbreviated ) is a verb form that combines past tense (reference to a past time) and imperfective aspect (reference to a continuing or repeated event or state). It can have meanings similar to the English "was walking" or "used to walk". It contrasts with preterite forms, which refer to a single completed event in the past. Traditionally, the imperfect of languages such as Latin and French is referred to as one of the tenses, although it actually encodes aspectual information in addition to tense (time reference). It may be more precisely called ''past imperfective''. English has no general imperfective and expresses it in different ways. The term "imperfect" in English refers to forms much more commonly called ''past progressive'' or ''past continuous'' (e.g. "was doing" or "were doing"). These are combinations of past tense with specifically progressive aspect, continuous or progressive aspect. In German, formerly referred to the simply conjugated past tense (to ...
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Perfect Aspect
The perfect tense or aspect (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated or ) is a verb form that indicates that an action or circumstance occurred earlier than the time under consideration, often focusing attention on the resulting state rather than on the occurrence itself. An example of a perfect construction is ''I have made dinner.'' Although this gives information about a prior action (the speaker's making of the dinner), the focus is likely to be on the present consequences of that action (the fact that the dinner is now ready). The word ''perfect'' in this sense means "completed" (from Latin ''perfectum'', which is the perfect passive participle of the verb ''perficere'' "to complete"). In traditional Latin verbs, Latin and Ancient Greek verbs, Ancient Greek grammar, the perfect grammatical tense, tense is a particular, grammatical conjugation, conjugated-verb form. Modern analyses view the perfect constructions of these languages as combining elements of grammatical tens ...
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Present Tense
The present tense (abbreviated or ) is a grammatical tense whose principal function is to locate a situation or event in the present time. The present tense is used for actions which are happening now. In order to explain and understand present tense, it is useful to imagine time as a line on which the past tense, the present and the future tense are positioned. The term ''present tense'' is usually used in descriptions of specific languages to refer to a particular grammatical form or set of forms; these may have a variety of uses, not all of which will necessarily refer to present time. For example, in the English sentence "My train leaves tomorrow morning", the verb form ''leaves'' is said to be in the present tense, even though in this particular context it refers to an event in future time. Similarly, in the historical present, the present tense is used to narrate events that occurred in the past. There are two common types of present tense form in most Indo-European langua ...
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