Tense and aspect

Within the English predicate, mood, reality status, modality, tense, and aspect are shown by a variety of formal means:

. MODAL and SEMI-MODAL verbs; these are Secondary-A semantic types;

. the auxiliary verbs have (taking -en on the following word) and be (with -ing on the following verb);

. verbal suffixes:

—what is traditionally called ‘past’, which is -ed on regular verbs, with a variety of morphological processes applying for irregular (or ‘strong’) verbs; for example, sing/sang, give/gave, cut/cut;

—what is traditionally called ‘present’, involving -s when the subject is 3rd person singular masculine, feminine or neuter, and zero suffix otherwise (verbs be and have show irregular forms).

In addition, the base form of the verb is used for imperative mood, and after to.

In this discussion, we begin with the grammatical systems involved, studying the contrastive meanings of the terms in these systems and their formal realizations.