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98-669: Traditionally, the imperfect of languages such as Latin and French is referred to as one of the tenses, although it actually encodes aspectual information in addition to tense (time reference). It may be more precisely called past imperfective . English has no general imperfective and expresses it in different ways. The term "imperfect" in English refers to forms much more commonly called past progressive or past continuous (e.g. "was doing" or "were doing"). These are combinations of past tense with specifically continuous or progressive aspect. In German, Imperfekt formerly referred to

196-400: A past perfect progressive (or past perfect continuous ) construction, such as had been working . This is the past equivalent of the present perfect progressive , and is used to refer to an ongoing action that continued up to the past time of reference. For example: "It had been raining all night when he awoke." It is also commonly used to refer to actions that had led to consequences in

294-545: A "completed action") correspond to the imperfect and perfect forms of the equivalent verbs in French and Spanish, savoir and saber . This is also true when the sense of verb "to know" is "to know somebody", in this case opposed in aspect to the verb "to meet" (or even to the construction "to get to know"). These correspond to imperfect and perfect forms of conocer in Spanish, and connaître in French. In German, on

392-599: A kind of lexical aspect, except that it is typically not a property of a verb in isolation, but rather a property of an entire verb phrase . Achievements, accomplishments and semelfactives have telic situation aspect, while states and activities have atelic situation aspect. The other factor in situation aspect is duration, which is also a property of a verb phrase. Accomplishments, states, and activities have duration, while achievements and semelfactives do not. In some languages, aspect and time are very clearly separated, making them much more distinct to their speakers. There are

490-621: A more elaborate paradigm of aspectual distinctions (often at the expense of tense). The following table, appearing originally in Green (2002) shows the possible aspectual distinctions in AAVE in their prototypical, negative and stressed /emphatic affirmative forms: (see Habitual be ) (see ) Although Standard German does not have aspects, many Upper German and all West Central German dialects, and some more vernacular forms of German do make an aspectual distinction which partly corresponds with

588-475: A number of languages that mark aspect much more saliently than time. Prominent in this category are Chinese and American Sign Language , which both differentiate many aspects but rely exclusively on optional time-indicating terms to pinpoint an action with respect to time. In other language groups, for example in most modern Indo-European languages (except Slavic languages and some Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi ), aspect has become almost entirely conflated, in

686-775: A past tense, it relates the action to the present time. One cannot say of someone now deceased that they "have eaten" or "have been eating". The present auxiliary implies that they are in some way present (alive), even when the action denoted is completed (perfect) or partially completed (progressive perfect).) Aspects of the past tense: Aspects can also be marked on non-finite forms of the verb: "(to) be eating" ( infinitive with progressive aspect), "(to) have eaten" (infinitive with perfect aspect), "having eaten" ( present participle or gerund with perfect aspect), etc. The perfect infinitive can further be governed by modal verbs to express various meanings, mostly combining modality with past reference: "I should have eaten" etc. In particular,

784-428: A past time had already been started (but not necessarily completed), (e.g. "It had already been raining for a week when the big storm started."). Bernard Comrie classifies the pluperfect as an absolute-relative tense , because it absolutely (not by context) establishes a deixis (the past event) and places the action relative to the deixis (before it). Examples of the English pluperfect (past perfect) are found in

882-424: A pluperfect form (called ὑπερσυντέλικος , "more than completed"). An example is ἐτεθύκει , "had sacrificed" – compare the perfect τέθυκε , "has sacrificed". Modern Greek uses auxiliaries to form the pluperfect; examples are given in the table at the end of this article. In Latin , the pluperfect ( plus quam perfectum ) is formed without an auxiliary verb in the active voice , and with an auxiliary verb plus

980-460: A prepositional for -phrase describing a time duration: "I had a car for five hours", "I shopped for five hours", but not "*I bought a car for five hours". Lexical aspect is sometimes called Aktionsart , especially by German and Slavic linguists. Lexical or situation aspect is marked in Athabaskan languages . One of the factors in situation aspect is telicity . Telicity might be considered

1078-427: A relation between the time of the event and the time of reference. This is the case with the perfect aspect , which indicates that an event occurred prior to (but has continuing relevance at) the time of reference: "I have eaten"; "I had eaten"; "I will have eaten". Different languages make different grammatical aspectual distinctions; some (such as Standard German ; see below ) do not make any. The marking of aspect

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1176-461: A slightly different word order, and is formed with the preterite form of ha ( have in English), i.e. hade ( had in English), plus the supine form of the main verb: När jag kom dit hade han gått hem - When I arrived there he had gone home . In Korean the pluperfect is formed by adding an additional "었". "었" is a morpheme that is analogous to the suffix "ed" in English, in that it

1274-515: A specific aspectual sense beyond the incompleteness implied by the tense: يَضْرِبُ ( yaḍribu , he strikes/is striking/will strike/etc.). Those are the only two "tenses" in Arabic (not counting أَمْر amr , command or imperative, which is traditionally considered as denoting future events.) To explicitly mark aspect, Arabic uses a variety of lexical and syntactic devices. Contemporary Arabic dialects are another matter. One major change from al-fuṣḥā

1372-449: A synthetic pluperfect ( mais-que-perfeito or antepretérito ) has been conserved from Latin. For example, Quando cheguei, soube que o meu amigo morrera , 'When I came, I found out that my friend had died'. In Portuguese, however, its use has become mostly literary, and particularly in spoken communication, the pluperfect is usually formed using the auxiliary verb ter , in the imperfect form (tinha tinhas tinha tínhamos tínheis tinham) plus

1470-553: A vedea 'to see'. Technically, this form is obtained from the singular third person form of the simple perfect tense by adding specific terminations for each person and number. However, in northern Transylvania there is a regional way to state the pluperfect (that may reflect the German influence). The pluperfect is expressed by combining the auxiliary verb fost or the short version fo ' (= "was" in English or "war" in German) with

1568-463: A verbal noun. In the Tyrolean and other Bavarian regiolect the prefix *da can be found, which form perfective aspects. "I hu's gleant" (Ich habe es gelernt = I learnt it) vs. "I hu's daleant" (*Ich habe es DAlernt = I succeeded in learning). In Dutch (a West Germanic language ), two types of continuous form are used. Both types are considered Standard Dutch. The first type is very similar to

1666-450: Is "past tense", in reference of it being a second past tense that exists along the regular one). Same as with them, in formal usage "ti" and "vós/vosoutros" change to "vostede" and "vostedes" and are followed by the third person. In verbs ended in -aer , -oer , -aír and -oír , the first and second person of the plural show the presence of a diaeresis . Hindi , an Indo-Aryan language , has indicative imperfect tense conjugation only for

1764-651: Is a grammatical category that expresses how a verbal action, event, or state, extends over time. For instance, perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to any flow of time during the event ("I helped him"). Imperfective aspect is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or habitually as time flows ("I was helping him"; "I used to help people"). Further distinctions can be made, for example, to distinguish states and ongoing actions ( continuous and progressive aspects ) from repetitive actions ( habitual aspect ). Certain aspectual distinctions express

1862-502: Is a past habitual , as in "I used to go to school," and going to / gonna + VERB is a prospective , a future situation highlighting current intention or expectation, as in "I'm going to go to school next year." The aspectual systems of certain dialects of English, such as African-American Vernacular English (see for example habitual be ), and of creoles based on English vocabulary, such as Hawaiian Creole English , are quite different from those of standard English, and often reflect

1960-512: Is also used to form the simple past tense. Thus In some of the Slavic languages the pluperfect has fallen out of use or is rarely used; pluperfect meaning is often expressed using the ordinary past tense, with some adverb (such as "earlier") or other periphrastic construction to indicate prior occurrence. Ukrainian and Belarusian preserve a distinct pluperfect ( давньоминулий час or запрошлы час – davńomynulyj čas or zaprošły čas ) that

2058-498: Is an additional way to construct a pluperfect by doubling the perfect tense particles. This is called doubled perfect ( doppeltes Perfekt ) or super perfect ( Superperfekt ) in German and plus past perfect ( temps surcomposé ) in French. These forms are not commonly used in written language and they are not taught in school. Both languages allow to construct a past tense with a modal verb (like English "to have", in German "haben", in French "avoir"), for example "I have heard it". This

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2156-475: Is clearly similar if not identical to the Greek aorist, which is considered a tense but is more of an aspect marker. In the Arabic, aorist aspect is the logical consequence of past tense. By contrast, the "Verb of Similarity" ( الْفِعْل الْمُضَارِع al-fiʿl al-muḍāriʿ ), so called because of its resemblance to the active participial noun, is considered to denote an event in the present or future without committing to

2254-539: Is considered archaic and is rarely used even in literary language. In Polish pluperfect is only found in texts written in or imitating Old Polish, when it was formed with past (perfect) tense of być "to be" and past participle of the main verb. The person marking is movable, e.g. zrobił byłem ~ zrobiłem był "I had done". Past tense of the adjectival verbs ( powinienem był zrobić "I should have done") and conditional mood ( zrobiłbym był "I would have done") are often wrongly considered pluperfect forms – morphologically,

2352-522: Is expressed without any auxiliary words, using a particular form of the verb, originated in the Latin pluperfect subjunctive (compare Italian imperfect subjunctive Sembrava che Elsa non venisse with Romanian pluperfect Părea că Elsa nu venise ). For example, in Când l-am întrebat, el văzuse deja filmul 'When I asked him, he had already seen the movie'. The verb văzuse is in the pluperfect form of

2450-598: Is formed by preceding the verb with buv / bula in Ukrainian and byŭ / była in Belarusian (literally, 'was'). It was and still is used in daily speech, especially in rural areas. Being mostly unused in literature during Soviet times, it is now regaining popularity. Here is an example of usage: Ja vže buv pіšov, až raptom zhadav... (Ukrainian) and Ja ŭžo byŭ pajšoŭ, kali raptam zhadaŭ (Belarusian) I almost had gone already when I recalled... In Slovenian ,

2548-412: Is inferred through use of these aspectual markers, along with optional inclusion of adverbs. There is a distinction between grammatical aspect, as described here, and lexical aspect . Other terms for the contrast lexical vs. grammatical include: situation vs. viewpoint and inner vs. outer . Lexical aspect, also known as Aktionsart , is an inherent property of a verb or verb-complement phrase, and

2646-440: Is itself a past event, referred to using the past tense ( found ). The pluperfect is needed to make it clear that the first event (the thinking and the supposed reaching) is placed even earlier in the past. Some languages, like Latin , make pluperfects purely by inflecting the verb, whereas most modern European languages do so using appropriate auxiliary verbs in combination with past participles . Ancient Greek verbs had

2744-551: Is largely equivalent to the usage in English. The additional perfect tense is constructed by putting the modal verb ("to have") in the past tense as if being the full verb ("I have had") followed by the actual verb in the past particle mode ("I have had heard it"). The same applies to those verbs which require "to be" (German "sein", French "être") as the modal verb for the construction of the past tense (which would not work in English). In spoken language in Southern Germany

2842-430: Is not (necessarily) when the event occurs, but how the time in which it occurs is viewed: as complete, ongoing, consequential, planned, etc. In most dialects of Ancient Greek, aspect is indicated uniquely by verbal morphology. For example, the very frequently used aorist , though a functional preterite in the indicative mood, conveys historic or 'immediate' aspect in the subjunctive and optative. The perfect in all moods

2940-468: Is not marked formally. The distinctions made as part of lexical aspect are different from those of grammatical aspect. Typical distinctions are between states ("I owned"), activities ("I shopped"), accomplishments ("I painted a picture"), achievements ("I bought"), and punctual, or semelfactive , events ("I sneezed"). These distinctions are often relevant syntactically. For example, states and activities, but not usually achievements, can be used in English with

3038-826: Is often conflated with the marking of tense and mood (see tense–aspect–mood ). Aspectual distinctions may be restricted to certain tenses: in Latin and the Romance languages , for example, the perfective–imperfective distinction is marked in the past tense , by the division between preterites and imperfects . Explicit consideration of aspect as a category first arose out of study of the Slavic languages ; here verbs often occur in pairs, with two related verbs being used respectively for imperfective and perfective meanings. The concept of grammatical aspect (or verbal aspect ) should not be confused with perfect and imperfect verb forms ;

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3136-436: Is often confused with the closely related concept of tense , because they both convey information about time. While tense relates the time of referent to some other time, commonly the speech event, aspect conveys other temporal information, such as duration, completion, or frequency, as it relates to the time of action. Thus tense refers to temporally when while aspect refers to temporally how . Aspect can be said to describe

3234-412: Is only one periphrastic tense which functions as both the present progressive and present perfect with reference to the setting in which is placed. বুলিছোঁ bulisü͂ বুলিছোঁ bulisü͂ বুলিছ buliso বুলিছ buliso বুলিছা bulisa বুলিছা bulisa বুলিছে bulise বুলিছে bulise বুলিছিলোঁ bulisilü͂ Grammatical aspect In linguistics , aspect

3332-404: Is rarely used now. In Italian , there are two pluperfects in the indicative mood: the recent pluperfect ( trapassato prossimo ) and the remote pluperfect ( trapassato remoto ). The recent pluperfect is formed correspondingly to French by using the imperfect of the appropriate auxiliary verb ( essere or avere ) plus the past participle. For example, Ero affamato perché non avevo mangiato I

3430-432: Is sometimes used in relation to the grammar of other languages.) English also has a past perfect progressive (or past perfect continuous ) form: "had been writing". The pluperfect is traditionally described as a tense ; in modern linguistic terminology it may be said to combine tense with grammatical aspect ; namely past tense (reference to past time) and perfect aspect . It is used to refer to an occurrence that at

3528-448: Is the aspect marker and the second element (the copula) is the common tense/mood marker. In literary Arabic ( الْفُصْحَى al-fuṣḥā ) the verb has two aspect-tenses: perfective (past), and imperfective (non-past). There is some disagreement among grammarians whether to view the distinction as a distinction in aspect, or tense, or both. The past verb ( الْفِعْل الْمَاضِي al-fiʿl al-māḍī ) denotes an event ( حَدَث ḥadaṯ ) completed in

3626-465: Is the basic aspectual distinction in the Slavic languages. It semantically corresponds to the distinction between the morphological forms known respectively as the aorist and imperfect in Greek , the preterite and imperfect in Spanish, the simple past ( passé simple ) and imperfect in French, and the perfect and imperfect in Latin (from the Latin perfectus , meaning "completed"). Essentially,

3724-461: Is the use of a prefix particle ( بِ bi in Egyptian and Levantine dialects—though it may have a slightly different range of functions in each dialect) to explicitly mark progressive, continuous, or habitual aspect: بيكتب , bi-yiktib , he is now writing, writes all the time, etc. Aspect can mark the stage of an action. The prospective aspect is a combination of tense and aspect that indicates

3822-639: Is used as an aspectual marker, conveying the sense of a resultant state. E.g. ὁράω – I see (present); εἶδον – I saw (aorist); οἶδα – I am in a state of having seen = I know (perfect). Turkish has a same/similar aspect, such as in Görmüş bulunuyorum/durumdayım , where görmüş means "having seen" and bulunuyorum/durumdayım means "I am in the state". In many Sino-Tibetan languages, such as Mandarin , verbs lack grammatical markers of tense, but are rich in aspect (Heine, Kuteva 2010, p. 10). Markers of aspect are attached to verbs to indicate aspect. Event time

3920-427: Is used to express the ideas of habitual actions or states of being; physical and emotional descriptions: time, weather, age, feelings; actions or states of an unspecified duration; background information in conjunction with the passé composé; wishes or suggestions; conditions in "si" clauses; the expressions "être en train de" and "venir de" in the past. Conjugation of the imperfect indicative: Notes: Conjugation of

4018-433: The imperfect of the auxiliary verb haber plus the past participle, the latter is formed with the simple past of haber plus the past participle. For example, in pluperfect Había comido cuando mi madre vino 'I had eaten when my mother came', but in pretérito anterior Hube comido cuando mi madre vino 'I had eaten when my mother would come'. This last form however is rarely used. Sometimes (specially in journalism)

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4116-441: The past participle of the main verb, as in had jumped or had written , often used in its contracted form ' d , as in I'd jumped . It is commonly called the past perfect, being a combination of perfect aspect (marked by the use of the have auxiliary with the past participle) and past tense (marked by the use of the past tense of that auxiliary, had ). It is one of a number of analogously formed perfect constructions, such as

4214-403: The present perfect ("have/has jumped"), future perfect ("will have jumped") and conditional perfect ("would have jumped"). Unlike the present perfect, the past perfect can readily be used with an adverb specifying a past time frame for the occurrence. For example, it is incorrect to say * I have done it last Friday (the use of last Friday , specifying the past time, would entail the use of

4312-402: The simple past tense is used instead: "He was hungry"; "We knew what to do next." Habitual (repeated) action in the past can be marked by used to , as in "I used to eat a lot", or by the auxiliary verb would , as in "Back then, I would eat early and would walk to school." (The auxiliary would also has other uses, such as expressing conditional mood .) However, in many cases

4410-436: The simple past , I did it , rather than the present perfect). However, there is no such objection to a sentence like I had done it last Friday , where the past perfect is accompanied by a specification of the time of occurrence, especially in a context that clearly provides for a connection with another past event, either specified (as in I hadn't met him then. ) or implied (as in I hadn't expected that. ). English also has

4508-399: The English continuous form : alongside the standard present tense Ich esse ('I eat') and past Ich aß ('I ate') there is the form Ich bin/war am essen/Essen ('I am/was at the eating'; capitalization varies). This is formed by the conjugated auxiliary verb sein ("to be") followed by the preposition and article am (= an dem ) and the infinitive, which German uses in many constructions as

4606-413: The English language between the simple past "X-ed," as compared to the progressive "was X-ing". Compare "I wrote the letters this morning" (i.e. finished writing the letters: an action completed) and "I was writing the letters this morning" (the letters may still be unfinished). In describing longer time periods, English needs context to maintain the distinction between the habitual ("I called him often in

4704-524: The Portuguese imperfect. Like in Italian, it is also commonly formed by combining the imperfect of the verb estar (estava, estavas, estava, estávamos, estáveis, estavam) with the gerund (for example, "falando", the gerund form of "falar", to speak, to talk). In Brazilian Portuguese, both in informal oral speech and informal written language (for example, online or phone texting), it is more common to use

4802-558: The action is in preparation to take place. The inceptive aspect identifies the beginning stage of an action (e.g. Esperanto uses ek- , e.g. Mi ekmanĝas , "I am beginning to eat".) and inchoative and ingressive aspects identify a change of state ( The flowers started blooming ) or the start of an action ( He started running ). Aspects of stage continue through progressive, pausative, resumptive, cessive, and terminative. Important qualifications: The English tense–aspect system has two morphologically distinct tenses, past and non-past ,

4900-575: The action pertains to the present. Grammatical aspect is a formal property of a language , distinguished through overt inflection , derivational affixes, or independent words that serve as grammatically required markers of those aspects. For example, the Kʼicheʼ language spoken in Guatemala has the inflectional prefixes k - and x - to mark incompletive and completive aspect; Mandarin Chinese has

4998-419: The appropriate ending (the forms for être (to be), whose "nous" form does not end in -ons , are irregular; they start with ét- but have the same endings). Verbs that terminate in a stem of -cer and -ger undergo minor orthographic changes to preserve the phonetic sound or allophone. Verbs whose root terminates in the letter "i" maintain the letter despite the consecutiveness in the "nous" and "vous" forms. It

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5096-490: The aspect markers - le 了, - zhe 着, zài - 在, and - guò 过 to mark the perfective, durative stative, durative progressive, and experiential aspects, and also marks aspect with adverbs ; and English marks the continuous aspect with the verb to be coupled with present participle and the perfect with the verb to have coupled with past participle . Even languages that do not mark aspect morphologically or through auxiliary verbs , however, can convey such distinctions by

5194-473: The composite "estava falando" (commonly reduced to "tava falando"), than to use the synthetic "falava", which is more common in formal written forms. Both in European and Brazilian Portuguese, the synthetic pluperfect ("eu falara" "I had spoken") is considered old-fashioned and never used in spoken communication – it is substituted by the composite "eu tinha falado", which is formed with the imperfect form of

5292-606: The doubled perfect construction sometimes replaces the Standard German pluperfect construction. In France it is uncommon in the Northern regions (with Parisian influence) but it can be found widely in Provençal dialects as well as in other regions around the world. In all regions the doubled pluperfect ("I had had heard it") is uncommon although it is possible - all of these forms emphasize the perfect aspect by extending

5390-399: The event is continuous or habitual. For a continuous action (one that was in progress at a particular time in the past), the past progressive (past continuous) form is used, as in "I was eating "; "They were running fast." However certain verbs that express state rather than action do not mark the progressive aspect (see Uses of English verb forms § Progressive ); in these cases

5488-540: The following sentence (from Viktor Frankl 's Man's Search for Meaning ): A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering had no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and more intensely. Here, "had thought" and "had reached" are examples of the pluperfect. They refer to an event (a man thinking he has reached the limit of his capacity to suffer), which takes place before another event (the man finding that his capacity to suffer has no limit), that

5586-445: The game began; "they had been writing " when the bell rang. The word derives from the Latin plus quam perfectum , "more than perfect". The word "perfect" in this sense means "completed"; it contrasts with the "imperfect", which denotes uncompleted actions or states. In English grammar , the pluperfect (e.g. "had written") is now usually called the past perfect, since it combines past tense with perfect aspect . (The same term

5684-406: The habitual nature of the action does not need to be explicitly marked on the verb, and the simple past is used: "We always ate dinner at six o'clock." Conjugation of the imperfect indicative: Notes: In Romance languages , the imperfect is generally a past tense. Its uses include representing: A common mistake of beginners learning a Romance language is putting too much emphasis on whether

5782-440: The imperfect indicative: Notes: In Spanish, the imperfect can be called the imperfecto or the copretérito . Conjugation of the imperfect indicative: In Portuguese, the imperfect indicative, called "pretérito imperfeito", is quite similar to Spanish: There are four irregular verbs: "pôr" (to put), "ser" (to be), "ter" (to have) and "vir" (to come). Unlike in Spanish, the verbs "ver" (to see) and "ir" (to go) are regular in

5880-483: The imperfect subjunctive with '-ar' termination can be used with a pluperfect sense in subordinated phrases, but it is neither normative nor recommended. In Dutch , the pluperfect ( voltooid verleden tijd ) is formed similarly as in German: the past participle ( voltooid deelwoord ) is combined with the past-tense form of the auxiliary verb hebben or zijn , depending on the full lexical verb: Voordat ik er erg in had,

5978-609: The imperfect subjunctive. It has a similar form to the Portuguese, thus, the Portuguese example below, in Judeo-Spanish, is: Kuando yegí suve ke mi haver morera , 'When I came I knew that my friend had died'. It remains the main spoken form, though in some varieties, similarly to Spanish or Portuguese, the pluperfect is formed using the auxiliary verbs tener or aver plus the past participle. For example, Kuando yegí suve ke mi haver tuve morido or Kuando yegí suve ke mi haver avía morido . In Portuguese and Galician ,

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6076-517: The imperfective and perfective. Yaska also applied this distinction to a verb versus an action nominal. Grammarians of the Greek and Latin languages also showed an interest in aspect, but the idea did not enter into the modern Western grammatical tradition until the 19th century via the study of the grammar of the Slavic languages . The earliest use of the term recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1853. Aspect

6174-574: The infinitive. The conjugated verbs indicate the stance of the subject performing or undergoing the action. Sometimes the meaning of the auxiliary verb is diminished to 'being engaged in'. Take for instance these examples: In these cases, there is generally an undertone of irritation. Pluperfect The pluperfect (shortening of plusquamperfect ), usually called past perfect in English, characterizes certain verb forms and grammatical tenses involving an action from an antecedent point in time. Examples in English are: "we had arrived " before

6272-474: The latter is actually past conditional, rarely used in modern Polish. In Serbo-Croatian , the pluperfect ("pluskvamperfekt") is constructed with the past tense ("perfekt") of the verb to be ("biti") plus the adjective form of the main verb. Alternatively, it can be formed by using the imperfect ("imperfekt") of "biti" with the past participle of the main verb. For example: "Ja sam bio učio" (or: "Ja bijah učio"), which means, "I had been studying". In Bulgarian ,

6370-474: The latter of which is also known as the present-future or, more commonly and less formally, simply the present . No marker of a distinct future tense exists on the verb in English; the futurity of an event may be expressed through the use of the auxiliary verbs " will " and " shall ", by a non-past form plus an adverb , as in "tomorrow we go to New York City", or by some other means. Past is distinguished from non-past, in contrast, with internal modifications of

6468-418: The meanings of the latter terms are somewhat different, and in some languages, the common names used for verb forms may not follow the actual aspects precisely. The Indian linguist Yaska ( c.  7th century BCE ) dealt with grammatical aspect, distinguishing actions that are processes ( bhāva ), from those where the action is considered as a completed whole ( mūrta ). This is the key distinction between

6566-427: The merchant, the buyer left." In French , the indicative pluperfect ( Plus-que-parfait , "more than perfect") is formed by taking the appropriate form of the imperfect indicative of the auxiliaries avoir or être and adding the past participle, j'avais mangé . Another type of pluperfect ( passé antérieur , "past anterior") can be formed with the appropriate simple past form of the auxiliary: j'eus mangé , though it

6664-425: The modal verb in the preterite or the auxiliary ( haben for all modals): There is a drastic shift of meaning between these variants: the first sentences denote that it "had been necessary" to rain in the past. The second sentence denotes that the speaker assumed that it had rained. In standard Swedish , the pluperfect ( pluskvamperfekt ) is similar to the pluperfect in a number of other Germanic languages, but with

6762-453: The modals will and shall and their subjunctive forms would and should are used to combine future or hypothetical reference with aspectual meaning: The uses of the progressive and perfect aspects are quite complex. They may refer to the viewpoint of the speaker: But they can have other illocutionary forces or additional modal components: English expresses some other aspectual distinctions with other constructions. Used to + VERB

6860-453: The non-standard German type. It is formed by the conjugated auxiliary verb zijn ("to be"), followed by aan het and the gerund (which in Dutch matches the infinitive). For example: The second type is formed by one of the conjugated auxiliary verbs liggen ("to lie"), zitten ("to sit"), hangen ("to hang"), staan ("to stand") or lopen ("to walk"), followed by the preposition te and

6958-480: The other hand, the distinction is also lexical (as in English) through verbs kennen and kennenlernen , although the semantic relation between both forms is much more straightforward since kennen means "to know" and lernen means "to learn". The Germanic languages combine the concept of aspect with the concept of tense . Although English largely separates tense and aspect formally, its aspects (neutral, progressive, perfect, progressive perfect, and [in

7056-422: The other hand, the sentence " I used to have fun in the 1960s. " is a good candidate for the imperfect, even though its period is known. In short, knowing when an action occurred is not nearly as important as how long it occurred (or was and still is occurring). To form the imperfect for French regular verbs, take the first person plural present tense, the "nous" (we) form, subtract the -ons suffix, and add

7154-411: The participle, which (quite difficult to explain) is stated in its feminine form. Examples: o fost foastă (or o fo' foastă ) = he had been; am fost văzută = I had seen; or fost venită = they had come. In Spanish , there are also two pluperfects, being the pluperfect proper ( pluscuamperfecto , or antecopretérito ) and the so called pretérito anterior (or antepretérito ). While the former uses

7252-454: The past (as in I was sleepy because I'd been working all night. ). The past perfect form also has some uses in which it does not directly refer to an actual past event. These are generally in condition clauses and some other dependent clauses referring to hypothetical circumstances (as in "If I'd known about that, I wouldn't have asked."), as well as certain expressions of wish (as in "I wish I hadn't been so stupid back then."). In German ,

7350-459: The past participle. For example, Quando cheguei, soube que o meu amigo tinha morrido . A more formal way of expressing the pluperfect uses the verb "haver". For example: Quando cheguei, soube que o meu amigo havia morrido . This periphrastic construction is not permitted in Galician, so Galician uses the synthetic pluperfect exclusively. In Romanian , the pluperfect ( mai mult ca perfect )

7448-431: The past tense] habitual) do not correspond very closely to the distinction of perfective vs. imperfective that is found in most languages with aspect. Furthermore, the separation of tense and aspect in English is not maintained rigidly. One instance of this is the alternation, in some forms of English, between sentences such as "Have you eaten?" and "Did you eat?". In European languages, rather than locating an event time,

7546-473: The past" – a habit that has no point of completion) and perfective ("I called him once" – an action completed), although the construct "used to" marks both habitual aspect and past tense and can be used if the aspectual distinction otherwise is not clear. Sometimes, English has a lexical distinction where other languages may use the distinction in grammatical aspect. For example, the English verbs "to know" (the state of knowing) and "to find out" (knowing viewed as

7644-421: The past, but it says nothing about the relation of this past event to present status. For example, وَصَلَ waṣala , "arrived", indicates that arrival occurred in the past without saying anything about the present status of the arriver – maybe they stuck around, maybe they turned around and left, etc. – nor about the aspect of the past event except insofar as completeness can be considered aspectual. This past verb

7742-422: The past. (I.e. "After I used to find it, I would sell it" OR "After I would find it, I would sell it"). The first example, being the preterite, refers only to actions completed once in the remote past, or distant past. In Judeo-Spanish , the Latin pluperfect forms with little alteration have been preserved (e.g. final /m/ and /t/ are dropped) to express this tense ( pluskuamperfekto ), which is identical in form to

7840-479: The perfect passive participle in the passive voice . For example, in the indicative mood : The subjunctive mood is formed similarly (in this case dedisset and data esset respectively). In many cases an ablative absolute phrase, consisting of a noun and perfect participle in the ablative case, may be used in place of a pluperfect; for example: Pecuniis mercatori datis, cessit emptor , "When money had been given (more literally: Money having been given) to

7938-400: The perfective aspect looks at an event as a complete action, while the imperfective aspect views an event as the process of unfolding or a repeated or habitual event (thus corresponding to the progressive/continuous aspect for events of short-term duration and to habitual aspect for longer terms). For events of short durations in the past, the distinction often coincides with the distinction in

8036-442: The pluperfect ( минало предварително време ) is formed with the imperfect tense of the auxiliary verb съм (to be) and the perfect active participle of the main verb. In Welsh , the pluperfect is formed without an auxiliary verb, usually by interpolating -as- before the simple past ending: parhasem , "we had remained". In Irish , perfect forms are constructed using the idea of being (or having been) after doing something. In

8134-490: The pluperfect ( Plusquamperfekt , Präteritumperfekt , or Vorvergangenheit , lit. pre-past ) is used in much the same manner, normally in a nachdem sentence. The Plusquamperfekt is formed with the Partizip Perfekt ( Partizip II) of the full lexical verb, plus the auxiliary verb haben or sein in its preterite form, depending on the full lexical verb in question. When using modal verbs, one can use either

8232-484: The pluperfect ( predpreteklik , 'before the past') is formed with the verb 'to be' ( biti ) in past tense and the participle of the main verb. It is used to denote a completed action in the past before another action ( Pred nekaj leti so bile vode poplavile vsa nabrežja Savinje , 'A few years ago, all the banks of Savinja River had been flooded) or, with a modal verb , a past event that should have happened ( Moral bi ti bil povedati , 'I should have told you'). Its use

8330-556: The pluperfect, bhíomar tar éis imeacht , "we had gone", literally, "we were after going". In Finnish , the pluperfect ( pluskvamperfekti ) is constructed with an auxiliary verb olla 'to be', which is in the past tense. The primary verbs get the past participle endings -nyt/-nut in singular, -neet in plural forms (the 'n' assimilates with certain consonants) and -ttu/-tty/-tu/-ty in passive forms. میں نے سنا تھا تم نے سنا تھا اس نے سنا تھا ہم نے سنا تھا آپ نے سنا تھا انہوں نے سنا تھا In German and French there

8428-438: The plural imperfect form (थे thē) in masculine gender but singular form (थी thī ) in feminine gender. These imperfect conjugations also act as copula to form the imperfect past forms for the three grammatical aspects that Hindi hasː Habitual , Perfective , and Progressive aspects. In Assamese , two imperfect forms are recognisedː present progressive and/or present perfect & past progressive and/or remote past. There

8526-435: The pronoun itself. So, the grammatically singular pronouns (e.g., मैं ma͠i "I" and तू tū "you" etc.) are assigned the singular imperfect forms (i.e. था thā or थी thī ) depending on the gender of the person or the noun they refer to, and the grammatically plural pronouns (e.g. हम ham "we" etc.) are assigned the plural imperfect forms (थे thē and थीं thīm̊ ). An exception to this is the pronoun तुम ( tum ) which takes in

8624-652: The simply conjugated past tense (to contrast with the Perfekt or compound past form), but the term Präteritum (preterite) is now preferred, since the form does not carry any implication of imperfective aspect. "Imperfect" comes from the Latin imperfectus "unfinished", because the imperfect expresses an ongoing, uncompleted action. The equivalent Ancient Greek term was paratatikós "prolonged". Bavarian does not have Imperfect. Imperfect meanings in English are expressed in different ways depending on whether

8722-525: The texture of the time in which a situation occurs, such as a single point of time, a continuous range of time, a sequence of discrete points in time, etc., whereas tense indicates its location in time. For example, consider the following sentences: "I eat", "I am eating", "I have eaten", and "I have been eating". All are in the present tense , indicated by the present-tense verb of each sentence ( eat , am , and have ). Yet since they differ in aspect each conveys different information or points of view as to how

8820-413: The time the action occurred is known. This generally does not affect how the imperfect is used. For example, the sentence " Someone ate all of my cookies. " (when translated) is not a good candidate for the imperfect. Fundamentally, it is no different from the sentence " We ate all the cookies. " Note this fails the repeatability requirement of the imperfect, as it is only known to have happened once. On

8918-400: The use of adverbs or other syntactic constructions. Grammatical aspect is distinguished from lexical aspect or Aktionsart , which is an inherent feature of verbs or verb phrases and is determined by the nature of the situation that the verb describes. The most fundamental aspectual distinction, represented in many languages, is between perfective aspect and imperfective aspect. This

9016-452: The verb "ter" (to have) (tinha tinhas tinha tínhamos tínheis tinham) plus the past participle ("falado"). Alternatively, the verb "ter" can be swapped with the imperfect form of the verb "haver" (to have) (havia havias havia haviamos havíeis haviam) Similar to the closely related Portuguese, as well as to Spanish, but often called "copretérito" (from co- , same particle found in English "collaboration" and "coexistence", plus "pretérito", which

9114-459: The verb होना ( honā ) [to be] and the rest of the verbs lack this conjugation. The indicative imperfect forms of होना (honā) comes from Sanskrit स्थित (stʰita) "standing, situated" which are derived from the PIE root * steh ₂- (“to stand”). The imperfect conjugation is derived from a participle form and hence its conjugations agree only with the number and gender of the grammatical person and not

9212-399: The verb. These two tenses may be modified further for progressive aspect (also called continuous aspect), for the perfect , or for both. These two aspectual forms are also referred to as BE +ING and HAVE +EN, respectively, which avoids what may be unfamiliar terminology. Aspects of the present tense: (While many elementary discussions of English grammar classify the present perfect as

9310-479: The verbal morphological system, with time. In Russian , aspect is more salient than tense in narrative. Russian, like other Slavic languages, uses different lexical entries for the different aspects, whereas other languages mark them morphologically , and still others with auxiliaries (e.g., English). In Hindi , the aspect marker is overtly separated from the tense/mood marker. Periphrastic Hindi verb forms consist of two elements. The first of these two elements

9408-522: The way tense does, aspect describes "the internal temporal constituency of a situation", or in other words, aspect is a way "of conceiving the flow of the process itself". English aspectual distinctions in the past tense include "I went, I used to go, I was going, I had gone"; in the present tense "I lose, I am losing, I have lost, I have been losing, I am going to lose"; and with the future modal "I will see, I will be seeing, I will have seen, I am going to see". What distinguishes these aspects within each tense

9506-409: Was het al twaalf uur geworden . - Before I noticed, it had become noon already . In addition, pluperfect is sometimes used instead of present perfect: Dat had ik al gezien (voordat jij het zag) - lit.: I had seen that (before you did) . The parenthesized part is implied and, therefore, can be omitted. In English grammar , the pluperfect is formed by combining the auxiliary verb had with

9604-404: Was hungry because I had not eaten. The remote pluperfect is formed by using the preterite of the appropriate auxiliary verb plus the past participle. In the Italian consecutio temporum, the trapassato remoto should be used for completed actions in a clause subjugated to a clause whose verb is in the preterite. The second example may refer to an event that happened continuously or habitually in

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