Decoding Time in Language: How We Express Past, Present, and Future

This article examines seven case-study languages (English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Arabic and Hungarian) to showcase these different systems. We will compare their typical solutions and explore what children and second-language learners acquire first—identifying the minimalist toolkit required to successfully navigate time in a foreign language.

Why Time Matters in Linguistics

Expressing temporality—the concept of time—is both a cognitive and a linguistic challenge. For a speaker and listener to understand when an event occurs, they need a shared conceptual framework. Languages provide a complex toolkit to build this framework, using a combination of elements that work in concert: verb forms, auxiliary verbs, particles, adverbs of time, and even intonation (prosody).

Different languages "share the load" among these tools in different ways. In some, the past/present/future distinction is clearly marked on the verb itself (morphological tense). In others, the focus is on aspect—the internal structure of an event (e.g., whether it is ongoing or completed). In many languages, the expression of time is inseparable from modality (the speaker's attitude, such as intention or conditionality) and evidentiality (marking the source of the information).

Key Concepts: A Quick Glossary

To understand how languages handle time, a few key terms are essential.

• Tense: The grammatical function of a verb form that situates an event in time relative to the moment of speech (e.g., past, present, future). It’s the basic "timeline" tool.
• Aspect: Refers to the internal temporal structure of an event, as if viewed through a camera lens. It describes whether an event is ongoing, completed, instantaneous, or repeated.
• Mood / Modality: Indicates the speaker's attitude or the reality status of a statement (e.g., indicative for facts, subjunctive for wishes/hypotheticals, imperative for commands). This is closely tied to time, especially for future or unreal events.
• Temporal Adverbial: Words or phrases that specify time (e.g., today, yesterday, two hours from now, last year). They are a universal tool for orientation, independent of a language’s grammatical system.
• Evidentiality: The grammatical marking of the source of the speaker's information (e.g., they saw it, heard it from someone else, or inferred it). In many languages, this system is intertwined with past-tense forms.

Case Studies in Temporality

1. English

• Core Strategy: English has a morphological past tense (e.g., walk → walked) but no dedicated future tense inflection. The future is expressed periphrastically with auxiliary structures like will or be going to. The system's true power lies in its use of aspect.
• Aspect: The progressive aspect (be + -ing) emphasizes an ongoing process, while the perfect aspect (have + past participle) signals completion or an event's relevance to the present.
• For Language Learners: The central challenge is understanding the functional differences between the simple forms and the aspectual ones (e.g., I read vs. I was reading vs. I have read).
• Examples:
  • She walks to school. (A general, habitual action.)
  • She walked yesterday. (Simple past.)
  • She will walk tomorrow. (Future.)

2. Spanish (Español)

• Core Strategy: A highly morphological language with a rich system of verb conjugations. It famously distinguishes between two primary past tenses: the preterite (pretérito) for completed, point-like events and the imperfect (imperfecto) for ongoing or descriptive past actions. The future is also marked with a dedicated inflection.
• Aspect and Mood: The subjunctive mood heavily influences the expression of future or uncertain events. The progressive aspect is often expressed with a periphrastic structure (estar + gerundio).
• For Language Learners: Mastering the distinction between the preterite and imperfect is a cornerstone of learning Spanish, as it is key to structuring narratives.
• Examples:
  • Ella caminó ayer. (She walked yesterday – a completed event.)
  • Ella caminaba cuando sonó el teléfono. (She was walking – background action – when the phone rang.)
  • Ella caminará mañana. (She will walk tomorrow – morphological future.)

3. Mandarin Chinese (普通话 / Pǔtōnghuà)

• Core Strategy: An analytic language with no tense inflection on verbs. Temporal relations are primarily expressed through aspectual particles, modal verbs, and adverbs of time.
• Aspectual Particles: The most important are le (了), indicating completion or a new situation; guo (过), expressing past experience; and zhe (着), marking a continuous state.
• For Language Learners: Instead of conjugating verbs, learners must master the use of particles and context. The correct use of le is fundamental to fluent communication.
• Examples:
  • Tā zǒu le. (他走了。) – He/She left. (Completed action.)
  • Tā qùguo Běijīng. (他去过北京。) – He/She has been to Beijing. (Experience.)
  • Tā míngtiān qù. (他明天去。) – He/She will go tomorrow. (Future marked by adverb.)

4. Russian (Русский язык)

• Core Strategy: A strongly aspect-oriented language. Nearly every verb exists as an imperfective (ongoing/repeated) and a perfective (completed/single) pair. The choice between them is fundamental. There is only one past tense form (which varies by gender and number), and the future tense is formed differently depending on the verb's aspect.
• For Language Learners: The central task in learning Russian grammar is understanding and internalizing these aspectual pairs. This system handles many of the distinctions made in English by simple vs. progressive forms or in Hungarian by verbal prefixes.
• Examples:
  • Она читала книгу. (Ona chitala knigu.) – She was reading the book (imperfective, process).
  • Она прочитала книгу. (Ona prochitala knigu.) – She read/finished the book (perfective, completed).
  • Она будет читать завтра. (Ona budet chitat' zavtra.) – She will be reading tomorrow (imperfective future).

5. Hindi (हिन्दी)

• Core Strategy: Hindi’s tense-aspect system is complex, relying on combinations of verb participles and auxiliary verbs. The completion or continuity of an action is marked by the participle form, while its temporal location is marked by the appropriate form of the auxiliary honā ('to be').
• Aspect: A fundamental distinction is made between completed (perfective) and incomplete/habitual (imperfective) actions. Past tense transitive sentences often use an ergative construction, which affects the grammatical marking of the subject and object.
• For Language Learners: Learners must understand the system of participle formation and how they combine with auxiliaries to form compound verbs.
• Examples:
  • Vah cal rahā hai. (वह चल रहा है।) – He is walking. (Present progressive.)
  • Vah calā. (वह चला।) – He walked/left. (Simple past/perfective.)
  • Vah calegā. (वह चलेगा।) – He will walk. (Simple future.)

7. Arabic (Modern Standard Arabic)

• Core Strategy: The system is traditionally based on two main verb forms: the perfective (fiʿl māḍī), which typically denotes a completed action in the past, and the imperfective (fiʿl muḍāriʿ), which typically denotes an incomplete or present action.
• Future and Mood: The future is formed by adding the prefix sa- (near future) or the word sawfa (distant future) to the imperfective form. The muḍāriʿ can also take different moods (e.g., subjunctive, jussive) that affect its temporal and modal interpretation.
• For Language Learners: Understanding the distinction between the māḍī and muḍāriʿ is the foundation of Arabic grammar. The system is logical once the root-and-pattern morphology is grasped.
• Examples:
  • hiya tamshī (هي تمشي) – She walks. (Imperfective/Present.)
  • hiya mashat (هي مشت) – She walked. (Perfective/Past.)
  • ***sa-*tamshī (ستمشي) – She will walk. (Future.)

5. Hungarian (Magyar)

• Core Strategy: Has morphologically marked present and past tenses. The future is most often expressed using the present tense form with a time adverb, or with the auxiliary verb fog + infinitive.
• Aspectual Tools: While it lacks the systematic aspectual pairs of Russian, Hungarian verbal prefixes (e.g., olvas "read" vs. elolvas "read through/finish reading") serve a very similar function in marking completion.
• For Language Learners: Correctly using verbal prefixes is key to expressing the completion or ongoing nature of an action, adding a crucial layer of meaning.
• Examples:
  • Ő sétál. (He/She walks/is walking.)
  • Ő sétált tegnap. (He/She walked yesterday.)
  • Ő holnap sétál. / Ő holnap fog sétálni. (He/She will walk tomorrow.)

Cross-Linguistic Patterns: A Typological Summary

• Two Main Strategies: Broadly, languages are either tense-prominent (like Spanish), where verb inflections mark time, or aspect-prominent (like Chinese), where time adverbs and the event’s structure are dominant. Most languages use a mix of both.
• The Primacy of Aspect: In many languages, especially in narrative, aspectual information (completed vs. ongoing) is often more crucial than a strict past/present/future classification.
• Pathways to the Future: The grammatical marking for the future tense often evolves from auxiliary verbs that originally meant something else, such as intention (will), movement (be going to), or obligation.
• Time and Evidence: In numerous languages, describing past events can involve evidentiality, requiring the speaker to mark the source of their knowledge.

The Learning Process: What We Acquire First

Child Language Acquisition

Children do not learn the entire temporal system at once. Their ability to express time develops in stages:

1. They first master deictic time words that orient them in the here and now: now, soon, yesterday.
2. The first verb forms to appear are typically the present tense or the simplest past form.
3. Aspectual distinctions (e.g., eating vs. ate) emerge relatively early, as they correspond to cognitively concrete differences in events.
4. More complex temporal relations (e.g., conditional past, future perfect) and fine-grained modal nuances are acquired later.

The Learner's Survival Kit

As a language learner, you don't need to know every tense to communicate effectively. This minimalist toolkit is usually sufficient to get started:

1. Core Time Adverbs: now, yesterday, today, tomorrow, later, before.
2. One Simple Present and One Simple Past Form: If the target language uses morphological tense, these two are enough for basic storytelling.
3. One Way to Express the Future: This could be a helper verb like will or simply the present tense combined with a future time adverb.
4. A Basic Aspectual Tool: A method to distinguish between a process and a completed action (e.g., English -ing forms, Hungarian verbal prefixes).
5. Basic Connectors: first, then, when.

"I am reading a book" Around the World

This table shows how our example languages express the simple act of reading a book across time.

(Note: In Russian and Hindi, verb forms can change based on the speaker's gender. The forms shown are masculine, with the feminine Russian past tense in parentheses.)

Concluding Thoughts

Expressing time is not a one-size-fits-all mechanism; languages place different emphasis on morphology, aspect, modality, and context. For the language learner, the most productive approach is to move beyond memorizing tense charts and strive to understand the underlying logic of the target language's system. By focusing on how a language structures events (aspect) and situates them in context (adverbs), the true communicative meaning behind "past, present, and future" becomes clear.