Abstract
Two of the main debates in philosophy of language concerning time and tense are the debate about the semantics of the tenses in the English language and the debate over whether propositions can be transiently true or false as opposed to always being eternally true or false. The latter quarrel is also known as the 'temporalism‐eternalism debate'. This chapter focuses primarily on these two debates. It briefly looks at the relevance of debates about tense and eternalism/temporalism to metaphysical debates about time. The chapter argues that the debates in philosophy of language are not logically independent of the debates in metaphysics. Kaplan's argument for temporalism rests on the premise that there are tense operators in the English language. This makes the debate about tenses directly relevant to the debate about temporalism versus eternalism.