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Please help to improve this art icle by introducing more precise citations. (September 2010) Grammatical categories Agency Animacy Aspect Case Clusivity Comparison Definiteness Evidentiality Focus Gender Mirativity Modality Mood Noun class Number Person Polarity Tense Topic Transitivity Valency Voice v t e In grammar, tense is a category that locates a situation in time, to indicate wh en the situation takes place.[1][note 1] Tense is the grammaticalisation of time reference, often using three basic categories of "before now", i.e. the past; " now", i.e. the present; and "after now", i.e. the future. The "unmarked" referen ce for tense is the temporal distance from the time of utterance, the "here-andnow", this being absolute-tense. Relative-tense indicates temporal distance from a point of time established in the discourse that is not the present, i.e. refe rence to a point in the past or future, such as the future-in-future, or the fut ure of the future (at some time in the future after the reference point, which i s in the future) and future-in-past or future of the past (at some time after a point in the past, with the reference point being a point in the past). Not all languages grammaticalise tense, and those that do differ in their gramma ticalisation thereof. Languages without tense are called tenseless languages and include Burmese, Dyirbal and Chinese[2]. Not all grammaticalise the three-way s ystem of past present future. For example, some two-tense languages such as English and Japanese express past and non-past, this latter covering both present and fu ture in one verb form, whereas others such as Greenlandic and Quechua have futur e and non-future. Four-tense languages make finer distinctions either in the pas t (e.g. remote vs recent past), or the future (e.g. near vs remote future). The six-tense language Kalaw Lagaw Ya of Australia has the remote past, the recent p ast, the today past, the present, the today/near future and the remote future. T he differences between such finer distinctions are the distance on the timeline between the temporal reference points from the present. Contents [hide] 1 Etymology 2 Tense marking 3 Other uses of the term "Tense" : Tense, aspect, and mood 4 Tense in languages of the world 4.1 Latin and Ancient Greek 4.2 English 4.3 Other languages 5 Grammaticalisation of tenses

6 See also 7 Notes 8 References 9 Bibliography 10 External links