Tense
Tense is a grammatical category by means of which some natural languages express the temporal location of the event described by the sentence in which the grammatical tense occurs. (This definition assumes a distinction between grammatical and lexical categories. For the technically inclined, lexical categories are part of the lexicon of a language and are open classes [classes that allow new vocabulary through compounding, derivation, coining, and borrowing]. They become inflected, and do not contract, affix, or cliticize. Examples of lexical categories are nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs. Grammatical categories are part of the grammatical system of a language and are closed classes [classes that do not allow additions]. They may contract, affix, or cliticize. Examples include inflectional and derivational morphemes and function words, such as prepositions, determiners, conjunctions, and pronouns.) An instance of a tensed language is English. In the English unembedded sentence "Bill called," the grammatical tense "-ed" conveys the information that Bill's call happened before the time of speech. Similarly, in the English sentence "Bill will call," the grammatical tense "will" contributes the information that Bill's call occurs after the time of speech. When a language does not have grammatical tenses, as in the case of Chinese, the temporal information may be conveyed by lexical categories, such as adverbs.
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