Grammatical Tense Definition and Examples

In grammar, tense is the time of a verbs action or its state of being, such as present (something happening now),  past (something happened earlier), or future (something going to happen). These are called the verbs time frame. For example, examine I walk (present), I walked (past), and I will walk (future).   Next, a verb can have an aspect, which  gives more formation about the state of the verbs action. They are simple, progressive, perfect, or perfect progressive. Simple is covered by the basic present, past, and future tense verb forms. A verb with a simple aspect doesnt necessarily specify if an action is complete or not. For an action thats  ongoing or unfinished, you use continuous/progressive tenses. If the action was  completed, you use perfect or perfect  progressive tenses:   I walked (simple past)  I am walking (present continuous, action is ongoing)  I was walking (past continuous, action continued in the past)  I will be walking (future continuous, ongoing action will happen later)I have walked (present perfect, action is completed)  I had walked (past perfect, action was completed in the past)I will have walked (future perfect, action will be completed in the future)I have been walking  (present perfect progressive, the current ongoing action is complete)I had been walking (past perfect progressive, the action was ongoing in the past  and completed in the past)I will have been walking (future perfect progressive, ongoing action will be completed in the future) Irregular Verbs Of course, not every verb form in English is as easy as forming regular verbs such as walk into its participles of walking and walked. Take, for example, go, which changes to went and gone  in the past: I went  (simple past)  I am going  (present continuous, action is ongoing)  I was going  (past continuous, action continued in the past)  I will be going  (future continuous, ongoing action will happen later)I have gone  (present perfect, action is completed)  I had gone  (past perfect, action was completed in the past)I will have gone  (future perfect, action will be completed in the future)I have been going  (present perfect progressive, the current ongoing action is complete)I had been going  (past perfect progressive, the action was ongoing in the past  and  completed in the past)I will have been going  (future perfect progressive, ongoing action will be completed in the future) Helpers  and Conditional Mood Auxiliary verbs, also called helping verbs, create continuous and perfect tenses; auxiliaries include forms of to be or has, such as in the examples from above: I am/was walking  (continuous)I have/had walked (perfect)I will walk  (future) English doesnt have a separate verb form for future tense (like adding an -ed to create a past tense word), just shows it through auxiliary words next to the verbs, such as I  will  walk, I  shall  be walking, or I am going to  walk.   If something might happen or it might not (conditional), thats the conditional mood (not a separate verb form either), and it also formed with auxiliary verbs, such as may or can: I may walk (present conditional) or  I  could walk (past conditional). The Debate as to Whether Future Is a Tense Many contemporary  linguists  equate tenses with the  inflectional  categories (or different endings) of a verb, which  means that they dont consider the future to be a tense.  English maintains an inflectional distinction only between the  present  (for example,  laugh  or  leave) and the  past  (laughed,  left). But if you equate tense with a time change, then future is indeed a tense. David CrystalEnglish...has only one inflectional form to express time: the past tense marker (typically -ed), as in walked, jumped, and saw. There is, therefore, a two-way tense contrast in English: I walk vs. I walked—present tense vs past tense. English has no future tense ending but uses a wide range of other techniques to express future time (such as will/shall, be going to, be about to, and future adverbs). The linguistic facts are uncontroversial. However, people find it extremely difficult to drop the notion of future tense (and related notions, such as imperfect, future perfect, and pluperfect tenses) from their mental vocabulary, and to look for other ways of talking about the grammatical realities of the English verb.Bas Aarts, Sylvia Chalker, and Edmund WeinerIn discussing tense, labels such as present tense, past tense, and future tense are misleading, since the relationship between tense and time is often not one-to-one. Present and past tenses can be used in some circumstances to refer to future time (e.g. If he comes tomorrow..., If he came tomorrow...); present tenses can refer to the past (as in newspaper headlines, e.g. Minister resigns..., and in colloquial narrative, e.g. So she comes up to me and says...); and so on.