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Intro to the thing

Tense, aspect, and modality are all of the different things that contribute to a language's verbal inflexional morphology or periphrasis. It is these three elements that contribute to the highest level of complexity and difficulty in both the obtention of foreign languages and the creation of new ones. As these three topics are complicated, a great deal of explanation is usually needed to instil understanding in anyone wishing to know all about them.

[whattypeofpantsamiwearing]

Tense

Perhaps the easiest concept out of these to understand is tense, which tells about the verb's location on the timeline. There are two types of tense; relative and absolute. The majority of inflexional morphology that appears on verbs is absolute tense, as it describes the grammatical expression of time as it relates to the moment of speaking. This includes the basic past, present, and future. Less common, however, is relative tense, which is often split up into two tenses; the strict relative tense, and the absolute-relative tense. The strict relative tense expresses time as it relates to the reference point, with no relation to the moment of speech. The absolute-relative tense, however, shows a point in time that relates to another point in time while all being in relation to the present moment. While the absolute tense is customarily synonymous with the three basic tenses, (past, present, future) many languages allow many different variants or completely different tenses. As an example, the language Bamiléké Dschang of the Niger-Congo language family splits its tense system up into five past tenses and five future tenses. The first layer of the past tense communicates the immediate past. The second refers to anything prior that day. The third refers to the previous day. The fourth is used in reference to an event that happened a few days previous. The fifth and final layer refers to anything that happened a year or more in the past. The future tenses are all within the same proportions but on the opposite side on the timeline.