Tenses are Important in the Speech

Abstract

Humans think of time in terms of space, as evidenced by the terminology we use to describe temporal relationships: we talk about stretching out or compressing an activity, moving toward the future, returning to the past, and so on. Linguists have depended on a special instantiation of the space-time analogy: the timeline, to describe the meanings of the tenses. The timeline is a line (or, more precisely, an ordered sequence of points) that is unbounded on either end and divided into three sections: the past, the present, and the future. While we may express many ordering relations between points on the timeline (such as when two events are described as contemporaneous), only one sort of relation counts as a tense relation: something which encompasses the moment at which the linguistic act is occurring