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Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a degenerative disease affecting language while leaving other cognitive facilities relatively unscathed (Mesulam, Wieneke et al., 2012). The three major variants of the disease affect language in different ways. The agrammatic variant is associated with grammatical impairments; the logopenic variant with deficient word retrieval; and the semantic variant with impaired lexical-semantic representations. Here we investigate verbal time reference in PPA. Verbal time reference specifies the information about when an event happens/happened. For example, drinks and is drinking indicate events in the present, but drank and has drunk indicate events that happened in the past. Prior evidence from many languages suggest that reference to past events is more tightly linked to complex grammar than reference to present events, hence past reference is more difficult to comprehend and more vulnerable to impairment in people with agrammatic aphasia resulting from stroke (Bastiaanse et al., 2011). The present study examined verbal time reference in patients with PPA, with the expectation that those with the agrammatic variant would evince greater difficulty with past than present time reference, but that logopenic or semantic variants would not show this pattern due to the relative sparing of complex syntax in these PPA variants.