tense in English

Every finite verb in English is present or past, and the choice is made by inflection. The regular past exponent is a suffix with three pronunciations conditioned by the final sound of the stem; a large closed set of verbs forms the past by vowel change instead, and a few by suppletion. The present is marked by an ending in one cell only and by the bare stem elsewhere, which is thin exponence but a real contrast, since the past form of the same verb is distinct.

Two terms is the whole inflectional inventory, and that is the divergence worth stating. There is no future tense form. Future time is expressed by the modal will plus the plain form, by a construction built on go, by the present progressive with a temporal adverb, or by the simple present in a scheduled reading, and all four are analytic. Whether the first of these counts as a tense is a question this record does not need to settle, because on any answer it is not an inflection: will takes no ending of its own, behaves like the other modals in every respect, and occupies the same slot they do, so treating it as a third tense would make the modal system part of the tense paradigm. A language with an inflected future and an inflected conditional has forms this one does not have.

Nothing in the language grades distance in time either. There is no separate recent past and no separate remote past, so a clause about a moment ago and a clause about a century ago take the same form, and any grading is done with adverbs. Relative time is handled by the perfect, which is filed under aspect because it locates a state relative to a reference point rather than locating the reference point relative to the speaking time.

The obligatoriness is recorded as obligatory because the contrast is settled wherever it applies: every finite clause carries a tense and none may leave it open. It does not apply to a nonfinite form, which is exactly why the finiteness record treats the presence of tense as the definition of that category.