The aim of this dissertation is twofold. On one hand, I describe the use of tense in the second language of the deaf - written Swedish. There is no previous description of this. On the other hand, I operationalize the transitivity model (Hopper & Thompson 1980) and test its scope. I test in part whether transitivity as it is described by Hopper & Thompson (1980) can be used to explain the use of tense by the deaf in my study. The reason why I connect transitivity with the use of tense is that I would like to see whether a transitivity analysis of a text can replace classification into foreground and background. If so, a transitivity analysis should be a sufficient method for testing the discourse hypothesis, which maintains that second language learners use their emerging verb morphology to signal foreground and background rather than tense.