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I am trying to identify tenses from complex sentences. but I am not sure what counts as a tense. so my question is probably: What counts as a tense? what is the bare minimum for something to be called a tense? can it exist without a subject? Thanks beforehand

Rafi
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    You hafta specify what language, first. English has only two official tenses -- present (is, goes, have) and past (was, went, had). Those modify the actual verb stem by inflecting it. We also have dozens of expressions that refer to past, present, future, and never-was-or-will-have-been contexts, like He was gonna hafta get married. Many of these (sets of varying sizes, but never all of them) are sometimes designated as "tenses" by various people for various reasons. So one finds "present progressive" as a tense, when in fact "present" is the tense and "progressive" is a construction. – John Lawler Apr 17 '20 at 20:49
  • Indeed, @JohnLawler. My particular bugbear is using the term future tense to refer to exressions with the modal "will". I know of no syntactic or semantic test that distingushes it from similar expressions with other modals, such as "may", "could", "might". Yet it is called a "tense", and the others are not. (It often refers to future time, but it has other meanings, and there are other ways to refer to future time). Like that other bugbear "subjunctive" the name seems to refer to how the expression might be translated into some other language. – Colin Fine Apr 17 '20 at 21:37
  • @Colin Fine My particular bugbear is the English language. But it's also fascinating. – Edwin Ashworth Apr 17 '20 at 22:13

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