The grammatical category of tense relates to the expression of temporal relations and the linguistic embedding of real-world situations in time. It involves highly familiar categories such as the present tense, the present perfect, and the past tense, as well as several others. Tense marking has been widely researched in the grammar of English both in the standard varieties and in the non-standard varieties that are the topic of this book. Section 6.1 of this chapter will introduce the foundations of this category, while Section 6.2 will be concerned with tense in varieties of English. In Section 6.3, we will explore cross-linguistic variation in the realisation of this category.

Overview

Before we can concern ourselves with the study of tense in English and its varieties, we first of all need to achieve some clarification about this category. As scholarly interest in it has been exceptionally extensive, we can only mention the most important facts at this point (see Comrie 1985 and Klein 1994 for very readable introductions).

We can define tense as a grammatical category for the expression of temporal relations. Comrie (1985: 9) states that ‘tense is grammaticalised expression of location in time’. I would like to emphasise the terms ‘grammatical’ and ‘grammatical category’, as temporal relations can also be expressed by a diverse set of lexical expressions (e.g. before, after, yesterday, two minutes ago, etc.). These will not be of interest here. We will define a linguistic expression as a ‘grammatical marker’ if its use is obligatory in certain contexts and it can be used together with a large number of lexical expressions. Grammatical markers, thus, belong to the regular and rule-based systems of language.