In the Spanish language, for example, the simple tenses (e.g., camino, caminaba, caminaré I walk, I was walking, I will walk) have imperfective aspect, whereas most compound tenses (e.g., he caminado I have walked) and the indefinite simple past (e.g., caminé I walked) have perfective aspect (see Liroz, 2006). Verb aspect is often associated with verb tense.

Furthermore, individuals are more likely to want to continue actions described in the imperfective than the perfective aspect and to recall details of the actions at hand ( Hart & Albarracín, 2009, 2011). Locations of specific situations become more active when verbs reference situations as ongoing rather than completed ( Ferretti, Kutas & McRae, 2007), and the characters in a story are more memorable when their behaviors are described using the imperfective aspect ( Carreiras, Carriedo, Alonso, & Fernández, 1997). Events reported in the imperfective aspect are described as ongoing more frequently than events reported in the perfective aspect ( Madden & Zwaan, 2003). imperfective) verb aspect to write a description of a prior behavior reduces the tendency to perceive the described actions as ongoing. Past research has shown that the use of the perfective (vs. Subtle changes in language produce different mental representations ( Givón, 1992), depending on how action is perceived. People make mental representations through a dynamic interaction of pragmatic, semantic, and grammatical linguistic cues to create situation models, which involve a mental simulation that integrates the agents, causality, goals, thoughts, actions, location and temporal cues involved in an event (see Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). Will describing an event in the present tense make it appear more concrete and familiar than describing the same event in the more “distancing” past tense? The research we report in this paper contributes to this understanding by exploring how the verb tense used in a narrative message determines how events are represented. Focusing on these aspects entails thinking about how we say what we say, and then adding this how to the study of communication, which has classically focused on “ Who says what in which channel to whom with what effect” ( Lasswell, 1948). Part of the art of designing persuasive communications is to choose language that will communicate the intended message and beliefs.

Present tense and past tense list