Tensemarked

Tensemarked is a linguistic term used to describe languages in which finite verbs carry explicit markers of tense, signaling the time of an event or state relative to the speech moment. Tense markers can be affixes, clitics, suppletion, or auxiliary constructions, and they may attach to the verb itself or appear in a periphrastic verb phrase.

In tense-marked languages, tense is distinguished from related categories such as aspect and mood. Tense concerns the temporal location of an event (past, present, future) relative to the moment of utterance, while aspect encodes the internal flow of time (completed vs ongoing) and mood conveys the speaker’s attitude or the reality of the proposition. Tense marking may be strong and obligatory on all finite verbs, or it may show up only in certain contexts or constructions.

Typologically, tense marking ranges from simple systems with a few distinct tenses (for example, past, present, future) to complex systems with multiple past distinctions (remote vs proximal) or future distinctions, and it can co-occur with aspect and mood markers. Some languages rely primarily on affixes to mark tense, while others use auxiliary verbs or particles. Still others have little or no obligatory tense marking and rely more on adverbs, context, or aspectual markers to indicate time.

Distribution and typology vary widely. Tensemarked systems are common in many Indo-European languages and numerous other families, but several languages (notably some East Asian and many creole or isolating languages) rely less on finite-tense morphology and use alternative means to express temporal relations.

See also: tense, aspect, mood, language typology.