Tense
As we saw in some detail in Chapter 11, tense refers to the grammatical marking of time relative to the time of speaking. In other words, a language is only described as having tense if it has a distinct morphological verb form that indicates past/present/future time. English is usually described as having two tenses: past and present (non-past). While past tense describes an event that took place prior to the point of speaking (15), the present tense is not restricted to describing an event that is concurrent with the moment of speaking (16).
While (16a) describes an event that is taking place at the time of speaking, (16b) illustrates the historical use of the simple present, where it can be used to narrate a sequence of events that took place in past time. The simple present form in (16c) describes an event that is located in future time. Finally, the simple present in (16d) is not interpreted as meaning that Lily is eating passion fruit right now, but that she habitually eats it. Notice that the mass noun con tributes to this interpretation. If the noun had an indefinite article (Lily eats a passion fruit), the sentence would instead have the flavour of a ‘stage direction’, where it describes a specific eating event, but observe that sentences like this are quite unnatural in ordinary spoken English when referring to present time. Instead, we use the present progressive (for example, Lily is eating a passion fruit). The fact that the simple present in English can be used to refer to past, present and future time, as well as encoding habitual events (a type of aspect), means that some linguists prefer the label non-past.
Future tense expresses reference to future time, but English has no future tense, since it lacks a verb form inflected for future. Instead, English has a range of different ways of referring to future time, some of which are illustrated in (17).
