Grammatical tense is a way
languages express the time at which an event described by a sentence occurs. In
English, this is a property of a
verb form, and expresses only time-related information.Tense, along with
mood,
voice and
person, are four ways in which
verb forms are frequently characterized, in languages where those categories apply. There are languages (mostly
isolating languages, like
Chinese) where tense is not expressed anywhere in the verb or any auxiliaries, but only as adverbs of time, when needed for comprehension; in the same condition, grammatical tense in certain languages can be expressed optionally (such as
Vietnamese), for example, "sinh" meaning "birth" and "sanh" meaning "birthed"; and there are also languages (such as
Russian) where verbs indicate
aspect in addition to or instead of tense.
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