Tidsstrukturen

Tidsstrukturen, or time structure, is the set of grammatical and discourse devices that organize events along a timeline in language and thought. It includes tense, aspect, mood, and temporal expressions that anchor actions to a reference point such as the present moment, the past, or the future. It also covers temporal deixis (words like now, yesterday, and tomorrow) and the sequencing relationships between clauses, which help readers and listeners build a coherent chronology of events.

Across languages, tidsstrukturen varies widely. Some languages encode time primarily through verb tense, others through aspect markers or temporal adverbs with little or no tense. Some lack a grammatical future tense, relying on context or particles; others use serial verb constructions to indicate sequence. The typology of tidsstrukturen intersects with modality and discourse time, the latter referring to the narrator's or speaker's perspective on time in a text.

In discourse and narrative, time structure shapes pacing and coherence: flashbacks, foreshadowing, time jumps, and time compression influence how events are perceived and remembered. It also guides translation and language teaching, and in linguistics and cognitive science it is a focus of cross-linguistic comparison.

Applied fields such as natural language processing seek to detect and normalize temporal information, enabling tasks like event ordering, timeline extraction, and temporal resolution in texts.