Tense is a grammatical category referring to the location of a situation in time. Strictly speaking, English has only two tenses of the verb — present and past — if tense is defined as being shown by a verb inflection. However, English has many ways of referring to past, present, and future time. We use a number of auxiliary verbs in combination with main verbs to refer to time. Time is also conveyed with the help of adverbs (e.g. nowadays, tomorrow), prepositional phrases (e.g. in 1990, before the next meeting), noun phrases (e.g. last week, this evening), and clauses (e.g. when we saw them, after the conflict is over).