Linguistic Library (Mike Green)

Tense refers to the way the time of an action can be directly indicated in a verb by changing its form (i.e. morphologically). English only has two verb tenses - present tense 'I leave.' and past tense, 'I left.'. However, we have many other ways of creating the idea of tense by using auxiliary verbs or other structures that indicate the time of an action. For example, each of the following grammatical structures suggests a future event, or a future aspect (the 'will' construction is often, but loosely, called 'the English future tense'):

• I will leave in the morning.
• I am going to leave in the morning.
• I shall leave in the morning.
• I leave in the morning.
• I am leaving in the morning.

Within linguistics, the word 'text' means any continuous and coherent sequence of writing or speech. See also discourse .