The nonpast tense (also spelled non-past) (abbreviated NPST) 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.[1]
The nonpast tense is observed in many languages. Due to a lack of future tense inflectional morphology on the verb stem, many languages which are poplularly conceived as having a three-way tense distinction (between past, present, and future), 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 [nonpast] 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 [past] better yesterday (which requires the use of a specialized past tense form, got, for the main verb; use of gets is ungrammatical).
Examples of languages containing the nonpast tense
Language
Sentence
Translation
English
I hope he gets better tomorrow
German[2]
Ich gehe morgen
I go-1PS.NPST tomorrow
Finnish[2]
mina menen huomenna
I go-1PS.NPST tomorrow
^"Nonpast Tense". Glossary of Linguistic Terms. 2015-12-03. Retrieved 2023-08-20.
^ abComrie, Bernard (2006). Tense. Cambridge textbooks in linguistics (8. pr. 2004 transferred to digital printing 2006 ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-23652-2.
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