Tenseaspectmood

Tense, aspect, and mood are grammatical categories that languages use to organize information about events. Together they are often referred to as TAM, or tense–aspect–mood, and describe when an event occurs, how it unfolds, and the speaker’s attitude toward it. The term tenseaspectmood can be used as a shorthand for the whole TAM system in a language or in cross-linguistic discussion.

Tense marks the time reference of an event relative to the speech moment. Common tenses are past, present, and future, though some languages have more or fewer distinctions or none at all, relying on context or time adverbs instead. Aspect describes the internal temporal structure of the event—how the event extends over time or its relative completeness. Common aspects include simple, progressive (ongoing), perfect (relation to a different time point), and perfective (viewed as a complete whole).

Mood expresses the speaker’s stance or the modality of the statement. Indicative mood states a factual proposition; imperative mood issues commands; subjunctive or irrealis moods express wishes, possibilities, hypotheticals, or non-realized states. Some languages also contrast deontic mood (obligation), epistemic mood (likelihood or source of knowledge), or evidential mood (source of information).

TAM systems vary widely across languages. Some use a single marker to encode multiple TAM features; others employ combinations of inflections, auxiliary verbs, or particles. Tense, aspect, and mood interact to shape the temporality, orientation, and modality of events, and are central to the analysis of verb systems in typology and description.