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A Few 'Language Miniatures'

It Really IS Time you Thought

Of the present, the past and the future

We view time as easily divisible into three neat and simple compartments, past (thought), present (thinks) and future (will think). But the examples above show that it's a lot messier than that, hard to see just what we're doing. It only takes a few moments' reflection on examples like those above to conclude that there just is no simple match between our tense forms and the time meanings we have in mind. What seems to be happening is that our understanding of the time intended comes not so much from the verb form itself, but rather from our knowledge of the real-world situation involved, helped by things in the sentence such as time adverbs.

So we can say They arrive next Monday, where the last two words indicate that the verb has to have a future meaning. Or we can say Yesterday he comes up to me ..., where the first word makes it clear that the verb is really past in meaning. For reasons like these, it is usual to say that English has just two tenses, past and non-past. The past tense usually refers to past time, but this is readily overridden by other words in the sentence: They arrived yesterday, but If they arrived now we could leave, and the above ...they arrived next Wednesday. The present tense can refer to any time, depending only on the social situation plus other words in the sentence like time adverbs (next Monday, yesterday).

Have you ever noticed how little those verb tenses tell us about the time sequence of two verbs? Understanding of this comes only from knowledge of the social situation itself. Take the sentence If Brian speaks, he has lost. Can you be confident you know what this is saying? Is his speaking the CAUSE of his losing, or EVIDENCE of his having lost? Depending on what you know about the situation, that one sentence can be understood as implying either 'Anyone who says anything is automatically disqualified', or 'The loser is required to announce the result'. Two opposite time sequences, speaking then losing in the first, and losing then speaking in the second.

By this point, you're undoubtedly thinking "But I thought that disorderly or not, time had to be divided up into the three boxes past-present-future. Where's the third one in all this?" The answer is that the person who said They arrive next Monday could just as easily have said They WILL ARRIVE next Monday. We can use the present tense without that will even if the future is not at all immediate: So we DO the show in two years, agreed?

We're in the habit of saying that will< and shall indicate the future, but there's good reason to question whether English has anything at all that can be called a pure 'future tense'. Since nobody can say what WILL happen with the same confidence that we can report what HAS happened, a connotation like 'probably' is inescapable no matter what the language. For instance, in Spanish and French, what the grammars call the 'future tense' always carries the meaning of probability in the present, so sera ('will be' in the books) has the everyday meaning 'probably is'. When someone we're expecting knocks at the door, we might say That IS PROBABLY Diane, but we can just as well say - referring to the present moment - That WILL BE Diane.

We started out by remarking how natural it is for us to think of time as neatly divided into past, present, and future. We take this so much for granted that it looks like one of those things (like having vowels and consonants, or verbs) that are surely part of all languages. Not only does time not consist of neat compartments, but there are no reference points at all to enable us to locate things in time. So most languages choose the present moment and orient everything to it in one way or another.

Languages around the world talk about actions and states in time in endless different ways. For at least one African language, past time is not just 'anything before now', but there are separate past-tense forms for what took place within this day, what happened during the previous day, and any prior time. And the many present tenses are even more fine-grained.

On the other hand, many languages don't have tenses at all. In such languages, it seems to matter more HOW something is done, whether continuous, repeated, begun, completed and the like. These distinctions are called aspects, and English observes many of them too. (See Miniature #121 for more on aspect.)

So: what hasn't happened yet goes ahead and happens, but it does it in a variety of ways, and then it has happened (or maybe it isn't quite finished yet?). And languages have invented practically infinite ways of talking about what seems so simple.

All essays Copyright © 1998-2004 by William Z. Shetter
Go to Language Miniatures at http://home.bluemarble.net/~langmin/index.html

Got a question? Send it to me -- kmdavis@erols.com and I'll answer it.