Tenses are a matter of time. Generally speaking, some time in the past, some time around now (present) or some time in the future.OTʜᴇB wrote:I'm not sure how quick of a question this will be, but could someone briefly explain how tenses and aspects work in a general fashion, and then give a few examples? I think I probably struggle so much with this as I only know minimal linguistics jargon.
Aspects are matters of perspective. Things like is the action ongoing; is it just beginning (or ending); is it complete or is it not yet done.
English (and I think other IE languages are about as bad) is a horrible language to use for examples, because we tend to conflate or mingle the two concepts into one form. For example, the present tense -- I am running -- is actually a conflation of present tense and progressive or ongoing aspect. What historically was the present tense -- I run -- is really more of a habitual aspect. Your crazy example sentence about someone on the verge of being nearly about to write some music would, aspectually speaking, be some kind of inceptive aspect (about to begin).
has some nice articles on these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_tense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_aspect