CHAPTER II THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
A. Simple Present Tense
1. The Understanding of the Simple Present Tense
The term “tenses” derived ultimately from the Latin word “tempus” meaning “time”.
1
The word tense stands for a verb form or series of verb forms used to express a time relation. Tense varied in different language. Tenses may
indicate whether an action, activity, or state is past, present, or future.
2
The major time indicator found in tenses are present, past, and future. Since tense refers to the time of the situation which relates to the situation of the
utterance, it can be described as “deictic”.
3
As John I. Saeed said, “deictic system is the ways in which a speaker relates references to space and time to the “here”
and ‘now’ of the utterance. Most grammatical tense systems allow the speaker to describe situations as prior to, concurrent with, or following the act of speaking.
4
In other words, deictic refers to an interval or period of time which contains the moment of utterance. It can be expressed by some words: yesterday, now,
tomorrow. According to Sylva Chalker “Tense is a form taken by a verb to indicate
the time at which the action or state is viewed an according”.
5
In talking about tense, it is not only focused on the time of the situation that is being described, but
also focused on English mark tense. From the preceded description, tense can be defined as “a way of language
to express the time at which an event described by a sentence occurs”. There are many kinds of tenses; one of them is simple present tense.
1
John Lyons, Linguistic Semantic an Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 312
2
A. S. Hornby, Guide to Patterns and Usage in English, Low-Priced Edition, 1975, p. 78
3
Bernard Comrie, Aspect: An Introduction to the study of verbal aspect and related problem, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976, p. 2
4
John I. Saeed, Semantics: 2
nd
edition, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2003, p. 125
5
Sylva Chalker and Edmund Weiner, The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar, Oxford New York: Oxford University Press p.395
6
Kategori