The nonpast tense (also spelled non-past) (
abbreviated ) is a
grammatical tense that distinguishes an action as taking place in times present or future. The nonpast tense contrasts with the
past tense, which distinguishes an action as taking place prior to the moment of utterance.
The nonpast tense is observed in many languages. Due to a lack of
future tense inflectional morphology on the verb stem, many languages that are popularly conceived as having a three-way tense distinction (between past,
present, and
future
The future is the time after the past and present. Its arrival is considered inevitable due to the existence of time and the laws of physics. Due to the apparent nature of reality and the unavoidability of the future, everything that currently ex ...
), can in fact be understood as having a two-way past-nonpast tense distinction. For example, in English, future sentences often take present tense verb morphology, and do not contain specialized future tense verb morphology. In contrast, past tense sentences require specialized past tense morphology. Compares for instance the sentence: ''I hope he
gets''
onpast''better tomorrow'' (in which the main verb ''gets'' is conjugated in the present tense, and the future is indicated lexically through the word ''tomorrow''), and the sentence ''I hope he
got''
ast''better yesterday'' (which requires the use of a specialized past tense form, ''got'', for the main verb; use of ''gets'' is ungrammatical).
References
Grammatical tenses
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