Here s another go Tense is the way in which language talks about the timing of particular events In general it is the way that language refers to events that are in the past or future or happening in the present The tagging of time references to discourse is technically temporal deixis All natural languages have the capacity to mark discourse for time However different languages use different grammatical methods of tagging these time referrences to sentences and hence the nature of tense can be ellusive There is a distinction between absolute and relative tense Absolute tense relates the time of an event to the now of the discourse often defining past present or future time Relative tense relates the time of an event to the time of another event that is not the now of discourse This is particularly common in historical narrative It is also possible to have a hybrid of absolute and relative tenses a discourse may relate the now to an fiducial event absolute and relate that time with that of another event relative Often there is a divergence between the way a language marks time semantically and grammatically An English example of this is I am going to eat the cake tomorrow Semantically this phrase is talking about the future However am is grammatically in the present tense and it is the use of be going to and tomorrow that mark that future time is intended There is some overlap between the concept of tense and aspect which describes the flow of time completed and incomplete action rather than point in time This distinction exists more on the semantic level grammatically many languages mark tense and aspect in similar ways In Latin replace this example with something less Indo European for example amavi means I have loved perfect tense present time and completed aspect and amaveram means I had loved pluperfect tense past time and completed aspect