This chapter consists of two main sections and ends with a summary. First, it addresses the description of four types of verbal tense (the simple past, the imperfect, the compound past and the present) in English, French, Italian and Romanian, as presented by grammar books and pragmatic studies focusing on individual verbal tenses. Second, it reviews the semantics of Tense, Aktionsart and Aspect, which are the constituent categories of the generic notion verbal tense, as they are discussed in general linguistics.