It’s a sort of “ackchyually” distinction. In colloquial speech “tense” may refer to any grammatical form of a verb that implies a tense, even though the form ma

It’s a sort of “ackchyually” distinction. In colloquial speech “tense” may refer to any grammatical form of a verb that implies a tense, even though the form may also express aspect and mood. In linguistics, as in any other academic field, people usually try to be more precise (https://wals.info/chapter/s7 https://wals.info/chapter/s7). Studying linguistics is already confusing because the boundaries between morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics are not so clear in the first place, so getting rid of any ambiguity is important to linguists, but those things aren’t important to people who simply study the language to speak it.