Tense: tense
| Values: | Fut | Past | Pres |
Tense is a feature pertaining to finite verb and auxiliary forms and participles only; it specifies the time when the action took / takes / will take place, in relation to the current moment or to another action in the utterance.
Modern Greek verb tenses are formed periphrastically mainly (composite tenses). In the GUD treebanks there are three stand-alone verb forms, i.e., not supported by auxiliaries, that bear Tense: one that is classified as “Pres” but it is also used in the so-called Future tense formations, and two forms marked for “Past” that differ in terms of aspect (perfect, imperfect). There is no verb form marked for Future; instead, there is the particle θα that is considered an auxiliary in the Greek UD treebanks and is assigned the tense feature “Fut” (but it would be probably more accurate to consider it a marker of potentiality and drop the feature ‘Fut’ from the Greek UD treebanks).
All verb and auxiliary forms in composite tenses preserve their tense and mood features, if they are defined for them.
Past: past tense
The past tense denotes actions that happened before the current moment. Modern Greek morphologically distinguishes between a perfective past tense (Αόριστος) and an Imperfective one (Παρατατικός).
Examples
- Perfective past tense: έγραψα “I wrote”
- Imperfective past tense: έγραφα “I was writing”
Periphrasticalloy formed tenses (composite tenses) describe situations occurring before a specified point in time, now, in the past or the future, with the use of auxiliaries, namely the verbs ‘have’ and ‘be’. In these cases, each form (the auxiliary and the verb) are assigned their own tense features. Certain composite tenses are formed with a form of the content verb that is tagged as ‘infinitive’ VerbForm and is not specified for tense and mood.
Examples
- έχω.PRES γράψει.INF “I have written”
-
είχα.PAST γράψει.INF “I had written”
- είμαι.PRES γραμμένος.(VerbForm=Part) “I am written”
- ήμουν.PAST γραμμένος.(VerbForm=Part) “I was written”
Pres: present tense
The present tense denotes actions that are happening right now or that usually happen.
Examples
- έρχομαι σπίτι “I come/am coming home.”
- γράφω το γράμμα “I _write/am writing _ the letter.”
Fut: future tense
The future tense denotes actions that will happen after the current moment. In Modern Greek, the feature future ‘Fut’ is always assigned to the auxiliarry θα that, however, combines with all the finite verbal formations of Modern Greek; the latter preserve their normal taggs. So θα combines with verb forms that bear Past or Present Tense features or no Tense features at all. It is important to note here that θα is often argued to express potentiality rather than the future tense per se.
Examples
- θα γράφω “Ι will be writing”
- θα γράψω “Ι will write”* θα είχα γράψει.INF “Ι would have written”
- θα έχω γράψει.INF “Ι will have written”
-
θα έγραφα “Ι would write”
- θα έγραψα “Ι would have written”
- θα γράφομαι “Ι will be being written”
- θα γραφτώ “Ι will be written”
- θα γραφόμουν “Ι would be being written”
- θα γράφτηκα “Ι would be written”
- θα έχω γραφτεί.INF “Ι will have been written”
- θα είχα γραφτεί.INF “Ι would have been written”
Tense in other languages: [ab] [abq] [aqz] [arr] [bej] [bg] [bm] [cs] [cy] [el] [en] [es] [fi] [fr] [ga] [gn] [gub] [ha] [hu] [hy] [it] [jaa] [ka] [ky] [pcm] [ps] [qpm] [ru] [sah] [say] [sl] [sv] [tr] [tt] [u] [uk] [urb] [urj] [xcl]