This is part of archived UD v1 documentation. See http://universaldependencies.org/ for the current version.
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Tense: tense

The Tense feature applies to verbs (VERB and AUX), specifying the time when the action took / takes place, in relation to the current moment or to another action in the utterance.

Note that we are defining features that apply to a single word. If a tense is constructed periphrastically (two or more words, e.g. present tense auxiliary verb + supine of the main verb) and none of the participating words are specific to this tense, then the features will not directly reveal the tense. For instance, [sv] Jag hade varit där “I had been there” is past perfect (pluperfect) tense, formed periphrastically by the simple past tense of the auxiliary att ha “to have” and the supine form of the main verb att vara “to be”. The auxiliary will be tagged VerbForm=Fin|Mood=Ind|Tense=Past and the participle will have VerbForm=Sup|Tense=Past; neither of the two will have Tense=Pqp, which is only used in languages where this tense can be directly represented morphologically on the verb.

Pres: present tense

The present tense denotes actions that are happening right now or that usually happen.

Examples

Past: preterite

The past tense denotes actions that happened before the current moment. It can also be used in secondary clauses to express a wish or something that is not reality.

Examples


Treebank Statistics (UD_Swedish)

This feature is universal. It occurs with 2 different values: Past, Pres.

11123 tokens (11%) have a non-empty value of Tense. 2200 types (15%) occur at least once with a non-empty value of Tense. 1381 lemmas (13%) occur at least once with a non-empty value of Tense. The feature is used with 3 part-of-speech tags: sv-pos/VERB (7182; 7% instances), sv-pos/AUX (2377; 2% instances), sv-pos/ADJ (1564; 2% instances).

VERB

7182 sv-pos/VERB tokens (62% of all VERB tokens) have a non-empty value of Tense.

The most frequent other feature values with which VERB and Tense co-occurred: VerbForm=Fin (7133; 99%), Mood=Ind (7117; 99%), Voice=Act (6016; 84%).

VERB tokens may have the following values of Tense:

Paradigm varaPresPast
Mood=Indär, äro, vararvar
Mood=Subvarevore

AUX

2377 sv-pos/AUX tokens (93% of all AUX tokens) have a non-empty value of Tense.

The most frequent other feature values with which AUX and Tense co-occurred: VerbForm=Fin (2377; 100%), Mood=Ind (2377; 100%), Voice=Act (2377; 100%).

AUX tokens may have the following values of Tense:

Paradigm kunnaPresPast
kankunde

ADJ

1564 sv-pos/ADJ tokens (18% of all ADJ tokens) have a non-empty value of Tense.

The most frequent other feature values with which ADJ and Tense co-occurred: VerbForm=Part (1564; 100%), Degree=EMPTY (1564; 100%), Case=Nom (1556; 99%), Gender=EMPTY (1001; 64%), Definite=EMPTY (921; 59%).

ADJ tokens may have the following values of Tense:

Paradigm ökaPresPast
Definite=Def|Number=Singökade
Definite=Ind|Gender=Com|Number=Singökad
Definite=Ind|Gender=Neut|Number=Singökat
Number=Plurökade
ökande

Tense seems to be lexical feature of ADJ. 99% lemmas (692) occur only with one value of Tense.

Relations with Agreement in Tense

The 10 most frequent relations where parent and child node agree in Tense: VERB –[conj]–> VERB (366; 70%), VERB –[mark]–> ADJ (5; 63%), VERB –[acl]–> VERB (1; 100%).


Tense in other languages: [bg] [cs] [de] [el] [en] [es] [eu] [fa] [fi] [fr] [ga] [he] [hu] [it] [ja] [ko] [sv] [u]