Zeit und Tempus

The aim of this article is to present the phenomena of time and tense which are strictly connected with each other and in some European languages are used synonymously. However, the German language makes a clear distinction between them. The lack of accordance between a tense’s name and its function often results in the fact that one tense expresses not only the present, but also the past or even the future, like the German tense Präsens. Lexical figures articulating temporal relations and Modalfaktor indicating the likeliness of a sentence’s content should be taken into consideration by temporal interpretation of a statement.