A Survey of ASL Tenses

This paper examines tenses in American Sign Language (ASL), which will be useful for the ASL Translation project. In the past, researchers believed that ASL used only Time Adverbials to indicate time. However, new evidence indicates that ASL marks tense grammatically as well. In order to properly analyze ASL tense structure, Aarons, Bahan, Kegal and Neidle identified the Lexical Tense Marker and proposed a notion called "Tense Phrase", which is a very important concept of the ASL syntax. This paper will discuss this Tense Phrase in great detail along with Time Indicator, Time Adverbial and Lexical Tense Marker.