Nonpast tense
The nonpast tense is a grammatical tense that distinguishes an action as taking place in times present or future. The nonpast tense contrasts with the past tense, which distinguishes an action as taking place prior to the moment of utterance.
The nonpast tense is observed in many languages. Due to a lack of future tense inflectional morphology on the verb stem, many languages that are popularly conceived as having a three-way tense distinction, can in fact be understood as having a two-way past-nonpast tense distinction. For example, in English, future sentences often take present tense verb morphology, and do not contain specialized future tense verb morphology. In contrast, past tense sentences require specialized past tense morphology. Compares for instance the sentence: I hope he gets better tomorrow, and the sentence I hope he got better yesterday.