> Tenses are not distinguished by their semantics, but by their grammatical form.
Annoyingly, people don’t always keep these two definitions as separate as they should be. This means there are language-specific grammatical structures called ‘past’/‘present’/‘future’, and also idealised temporal semantics called ‘past’/‘present’/‘future’. This is why you get things like the so-called ‘English future tense’, which is used sometimes as a future tense but just as often for modal certainty.
(The situation is even worse when it comes to aspect. It took me a very long time to understand what ‘perfective’ meant, because the ‘perfective’ category in different languages means different things!)
Annoyingly, people don’t always keep these two definitions as separate as they should be. This means there are language-specific grammatical structures called ‘past’/‘present’/‘future’, and also idealised temporal semantics called ‘past’/‘present’/‘future’. This is why you get things like the so-called ‘English future tense’, which is used sometimes as a future tense but just as often for modal certainty.
(The situation is even worse when it comes to aspect. It took me a very long time to understand what ‘perfective’ meant, because the ‘perfective’ category in different languages means different things!)