Spatial tense is a grammatical category that refers to the indication of the place of an event, analogue to the use of the more common category of
grammatical tense to indicate the time of an event.
The term "spatial tense" is mostly employed in the grammar of
Lojban
Lojban (pronounced ) is a logical, constructed, human language created by the Logical Language Group which aims to be syntactically unambigious. It succeeds the Loglan project.
The Logical Language Group (LLG) began developing Lojban in 1987. ...
(an
artificial language
Artificial languages are languages of a typically very limited size which emerge either in computer simulations between artificial agents, robot interactions or controlled psychological experiments with humans. They are different from both constr ...
). In Lojban, temporal and spatial tense are treated alike. When present, they are marked by particles that may appear in different parts of the sentence according to the emphasis the speaker wants to convey. The spatial tense
morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.
In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone are ...
s show position and/or distance relative to the speaker. The difference between spatial tense and the use of words and phrases like "here", "to the left", "at a short distance ahead", etc., lies in the fact that these phrases are simply lexical items, while spatial tense is a grammatical category of the verb (more properly speaking, the predicate).
Grammatical tenses
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