Tense (definition)

Tense is the reference of one period of time to another in sentence. The most often referred to tenses are past, present, and future. In other languages there are more than three tenses. An example would be Spanish which has present, indicative, subjunctive, imperfect indicative, and others. These tense are marked by morphological changes and by auxiliaries.

References

Crystal, David, and David Crystal. The Penguin Dictionary of Language. London: Penguin, 1999.

Matthews, P. H. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.