Tense: tense
Tense is a feature that specifies the time when the action took / takes / will take place, in relation to the current moment or to another action in the utterance.
Past: past tense
The past tense denotes actions that happened before the current moment. Past tense in Czech consists of the past participle (also called active participle or l-participle), which is accompanied by a present auxiliary verb in the first and second persons, and stands alone in the third person.
The auxiliary (if any) is in its present form, so it will have Tense=Pres.
The participle has Tense=Past, even though it can also be used to form present conditional.
Examples
- Я ушёл домой. “I have gone home.”
- Ты ушёл домой. “You have gone home.”
- Он ушёл домой. “He has gone home.”
Pres: present tense
The present tense denotes actions that are happening right now or that usually happen.
Note that morphologically present forms of perfective verbs have actually a future meaning
but they will still be marked Tense=Pres.
Examples
- Прихожу домой. “I come / am coming home.” (Přicházet is an imperfective verb.)
- Приду домой. “I will come home.” (Přijít is a perfective verb.)
- Иду домой. “I go / am going home.” (Jít is an imperfective verb.)
Fut: future tense
The future tense denotes actions that will happen after the current moment. Future tense in Russian is formed in one of three ways, depending of the verb:
- Present forms of perfective verbs have future meaning. These forms are tagged
Tense=Pres, notTense=Fut(see above). - The verb быть “to be” has a set of distinct future forms. They combine a future stem буд with present suffixes.
A small set of verbs (mostly motion verbs) have also future forms. These are formed as the present form (present stem and suffix)
with the prefix по-.
Although these forms are morphologically very close to the present forms, they are tagged
Tense=Futbecause the same lemma has also present forms and the feature must distinguish the two. - The remaining imperfective verbs have periphrastic future forms, consiting of the future form of the auxiliary быть,
and the infinitive of the content verb. Only the auxiliary will have
Tense=Fut, while there will be no tense information at the infinitive.
Examples
- Пойду домой. “I will go home.” (Jít is an imperfective verb, phonological rule transformed the prefix po- to pů-.)
- Буду идти домой. “I will be coming home.” (Идти is an imperfective verb and it forms future periphrastically.)
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]