ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, we showed that different forms of the verb, in ISL as well as in Hebrew (and to a lesser extent in English), encode agreement with the verb’s arguments. In Hebrew and English, the different verb forms express not only verb agreement, but also tense differences. Forms such as talk, talked and will talk denote an action that occurred in the past, present or future. In many of the more familiar languages, such as English, French, German, Russian, Hebrew and Arabic, verbs encode, we say inflect for, tense. Therefore tense seems to be a universal category, and it is difficult to imagine how a language can get by without tense.
