Yesterday is a temporal construct of the relative

past The past is the set of all events that occurred before a given point in time. The past is contrasted with and defined by the present and the future. The concept of the past is derived from the linear fashion in which human observers experience ...

; literally of the

day A day is the time period of a full rotation of the Earth with respect to the Sun. On average, this is 24 hours, 1440 minutes, or 86,400 seconds. In everyday life, the word "day" often refers to a solar day, which is the length between two ...

before the current day (today), or figuratively of earlier periods or times, often but not always within living memory.

Learning and language

The concepts of "yesterday", "

today Today (archaically to-day) may refer to: * Day of the present, the time that is perceived directly, often called ''now'' * Current era, present * The current calendar date Arts, entertainment, and media Films * ''Today'' (1930 film), a 1930 ...

" and " tomorrow" are among the first relative time concepts acquired by

infant An infant or baby is the very young offspring of human beings. ''Infant'' (from the Latin word ''infans'', meaning 'unable to speak' or 'speechless') is a formal or specialised synonym for the common term ''baby''. The terms may also be used t ...

s. In language a distinctive noun or

adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...

for "yesterday" is present in most but not all languages, though languages with ambiguity in vocabulary also have other ways to distinguish the immediate past and immediate future. "Yesterday" is also a relative term and concept in

grammar In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraints, a field that includes doma ...

and

syntax In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituenc ...

.The Function of tense in texts Jadranka Gvozdanović, Theodorus Albertus Johannes Maria Janssen, Östen Dahl - 1991 - Volumes 144 to 146 - Page 100 "Yesterday is relative to the day 'where we are', a minute ago to the minute, more or less, 500 years ago to 'our present' in a thematically suitable sense, perhaps 'this century', or 'modern times'. " Yesterday is an abstract concept in the sense that events that occurred in the past do not exist in the present reality, though their consequences persist. Some languages have a

hesternal tense A hesternal tense (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a past tense for the previous day. (''Hesterno die'' is Latin for 'yesterday'.) Hesternal tense refers to an event which occurred yesterday (in an absolute tense system) or on the ...

: a dedicated grammatical form for events of the previous day.

References

External links

{{Time topics Past Days