How Many Tenses Does English Have? Fewer Than You Were Taught

Verbs carry information about three distinct matters that school grammar runs together. Tense locates a situation in time relative to the moment of speaking, so past and present are tenses. Aspect describes the internal shape of a situation, meaning whether it is presented as complete, ongoing or repeated, which is a separate question from when it happened. Mood, sometimes called modality, concerns the speaker's attitude to the situation, including whether it is asserted, wished for, doubted or presented as possible. Once those are separated, the English system becomes tractable, since what is usually taught as twelve tenses is two tenses combined with two aspects and a modal verb.

The system is smaller than the traditional account suggests:

• •Two tenses marked on the verb itself, past and non-past, distinguished by an ending
• •Two aspects, progressive and perfect, each formed with an auxiliary verb
• •Those combine to give eight combinations, which is where most of the traditional list comes from
• •Future is expressed with a modal verb rather than by any ending on the verb
• •Several other ways of referring to the future exist, including the present tense
• •The subjunctive survives in a few constructions and is largely marginal

Whether English has a future tense is the sharpest disagreement and the reasoning on each side is clear. Against, the point is that future is expressed by a modal auxiliary belonging to the same class as can, may and must, that it is not marked on the verb by an ending as past is, and that those modals carry meanings of prediction and intention rather than pure time reference, which is why a sentence about the future can use the present tense instead. In favour, the point is that the construction is the ordinary way of referring to future time and that requiring an inflectional ending is an arbitrary criterion borrowed from Latin. The dispute is about definition, and both sides agree about the facts of usage.

Comparison with other languages shows how differently the same territory can be carved up. Many languages mark aspect more prominently than tense, distinguishing completed from ongoing action grammatically while leaving the time reference to context, which is the arrangement in Slavic languages and in Chinese. Some languages mark how the speaker came by the information, requiring a different form for something witnessed, something inferred and something reported, which is called evidentiality and is obligatory in several families. Some mark degrees of past, distinguishing earlier today from yesterday from long ago. Some have no tense marking at all. What every language supplies is a way of conveying time, and which parts of that are grammatical and which are left to adverbs and context varies enormously.

The twelve-tense framework has an explanation and a defence. It descends from describing English through categories developed for Latin, which has a genuinely richer inflectional system with distinct forms for many combinations, and applying those categories to a language that expresses the same meanings with auxiliaries produces a list of constructions labelled as tenses. It persists in teaching because it works, since a learner needs to produce and understand each combination and a list of named patterns with examples is a practical way to teach them, whatever the theoretical status of the labels. Linguists describing the system and teachers building competence in it are doing different jobs, and the disagreement between them is less substantial than it appears.

Tense locates a situation in time, aspect describes its internal shape and mood carries the speaker's attitude, and running the three together is what produces the long traditional list. English marks two tenses on the verb itself and forms two aspects with auxiliaries. Whether the future counts is a dispute about definition, since it uses a modal auxiliary rather than an ending.