prescriptive grammar Linguistic prescription, or prescriptive grammar, is the establishment of rules defining preferred usage of language. These rules may address such linguistic aspects as spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax, and semantics. Sometimes info ...

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national id ...

, tense confusion is a purported grammatical or stylistic error which occurs when a writer shifts from the

present tense The present tense ( abbreviated or ) is a grammatical tense whose principal function is to locate a situation or event in the present time. The present tense is used for actions which are happening now. In order to explain and understand present ...

to the

past tense The past tense is a grammatical tense whose function is to place an action or situation in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs ''sang'', ''went'' and ''washed''. Most languages have a past tense, with some hav ...

(or vice versa) in an

embedded clause A subordinate clause, dependent clause, subclause, or embedded clause is a clause that is embedded within a complex sentence. For instance, in the English sentence "I know that Bette is a dolphin", the clause "that Bette is a dolphin" occurs as t ...

. The following example would be categorized as an instance of tense confusion since it shifts from past tense "saw" in the matrix clause to present tense "is" in the embedded clause. * "He ''saw'' that she ''is'' very tall." Research in

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingu ...

regards such sentences as instances of the sequence of tense phenomenon. There is, in fact, a meaning contrast between the following two sentences. This meaning contrast is lost when so-called "tense confusions" are prescribed against. * "He ''noticed'' that she ''ran'' every day" (

implicature In pragmatics, a subdiscipline of linguistics, an implicature is something the speaker suggests or implies with an utterance, even though it is not literally expressed. Implicatures can aid in communicating more efficiently than by explicitly say ...

: she no longer runs every day ''or'' whether or not she still runs, he cannot validly conclude that she does) * "He ''noticed'' that she ''runs'' every day" (no such implicature) The first sentence implies that the proposition "she runs every day" no longer holds, while the second doesn't. Thus, different tenses in the

serve different communicative functions.

References

Grammar {{grammar-stub