1. Tense Categories of the English Language

1.Tense Categories of the English Language
The category of tense may be defined as a verbal category which reflects the objective category of time and expresses on this background the relations between the time of the action and the time of the utterance. English Tenses
In Engl there are three tenses (past, present and future) represented by the forms wrote, writes, will write. Strangely enough, some doubts have been expressed about the existence of a future tense in Engl. O. Jespersen discussed this question more than once. The reason why Jespersen denied the existence of a future tense in English was that the English future is expressed by the phrase “shall/will + infinitive”, their original meaning (shall an element of obligation and will an element of volition). However, this reasoning is not convincing. It is well known that a present tense form may also be used when the action belongs to the future. “Maroo is is coming tomorrow” So it might also have beeen expressed by the future tense: Maroo will come tomorrow. Maroo’s arrival tomorrow is part of a plan already fixed at the present. So the three main divisions of time are represented in the Engl verbal system by the three tenses. Each of them may appear in the common and in the continuous aspect. Thus we get six tense-aspect forms.
Besides these six, however, there are two more, namely, the future-in-the-past and the future-continuous-in-the-past. The future-in-the-past and future-cont-in-the-past do not easily fit into a system of tenses represented by a straight line running out of the past into the future. They are a deviation from this straight line: their starting point is not the present, from which the past and the future are reckoned, but the past itself.
A different view of the English tense system has been put forward by Irtenyeva. According to this view, the system is divided into two halves: that of tenses centring in the present, and that of tenses centring in the past. The former would comprise the present, present perfect, future, present continuous, and present prefect continuous, whereas the latter would comprise the past, past perfect, future-in-the-past, past continuous, and past perfect continuous. The latter half is characterized by specific features: the root vowel (sang as against sing); and the suffix –d (-t), looked, had sung, would sing, had been singing.