Dear professor: could you explain what the timeless present is, please? semantically speaking, does English have tenseless verbs? for example, “One plus one is two”. Is “is” in the sentence tenseless? Anyway, the sentence refers to no specific time. in this case, how to interpret the tense meaning in relation to time? thank you.
Hi, ha
‘Timeless’ here refers to the use of the present tense when you refer to for example what a writer has written, which has no relation to any particular time as in:
Shakespeare describes the experiences of an old man going insane in his tragedy, King Lear.
It can also be used when you are referring to facts as in: water freezes.
Alan