Past tense

Past tense
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For other uses, see past tense (disambiguation)
A past tense (abbreviated PST) is a grammatical tense that places an action or situation in the past of the current moment (in an absolute tense system), or prior to some other event, whether that is past, present, or future (in a relative tense system).[1] Not all languages mark verbs for the past tense (Mandarin Chinese, for example, does not); in some languages, the grammatical expression of tense is mixed with the expression of mood and/or aspect (see Tense-aspect-mood).

In English, there are two verb forms which are commonly called "past tense", the so-called simple past, sometimes misleadingly called the preterite, which is a true tense, and the present perfect, which is generally considered an aspect rather than a tense.[1][2] These combine with other aspects including the progressive (continuous) aspect to create several additional forms:
Simple past is formed for regular verbs by adding -d or – ed to the root of a word. Examples: He walked to the store, or They danced all night.. A negation is produced by adding did not and the verb in its infinitive form. Example: He did not walk to the store. Question sentences are started with did as in Did he walk to the store?
Simple past is used for describing acts that have already been concluded and whose exact time of occurrence is known. Furthermore, simple past is used for retelling successive events. That is why it is commonly used in storytelling.
Past progressive is formed by using the adequate form of to be and the verb’s present participle: He was going to church. By inserting not before the main verb a negation is achieved. Example: He was not going to church. A question is formed by prefixing the adequate form of to be as in Was he going?.
Past progressive is used for describing events that were in the process of occurring when a new event happened. The already occurring event is presented in past progressive, the new one in simple past. Example: We were sitting in the garden when the thunderstorm started. Use is similar to other languages' imperfect.
Present perfect is formed by combining have/has with the main verb’s past participle form: I have arrived. A negation is produced by inserting not after have/has: I have not arrived. Questions in present perfect are formulated by starting a sentence with have/has: Has she arrived?
Present perfect is used for describing a past action’s effect on the present: He has arrived. Now he is here. This holds true for events that have just been concluded as well as for events that have not yet occurred.
Present perfect progressive is formed by prefixing have/has before the grammatical participle been and the verb’s present participial form: We have been waiting. A negation is expressed by including not between have/has and been: They have not been eating. As with present perfect simple, for forming a question, have/has is put at the beginning of a sentence: Have they been eating?
Present perfect progressive is used for describing an event that has been going on until the present and may be continued in the future. It also puts emphasis on how an event has occurred. Very often since and for mark the use of present perfect progressive: I have been waiting for five hours / I have been waiting since three o’clock.
Furthermore, there is another version of past tense possible: past perfect, similar to other languages' pluperfect.
Past perfect is formed by combining the simple past form of to have with the past participle form of the main verb: We had shouted. A negation is achieved by including not after had: You had not spoken. Questions in past perfect always start with had: Had he laughed?
Past perfect is used for describing secluded events that have occurred before something else followed. The event that is closer to the present is given in simple past tense: After we had visited our relatives in New York, we flew back to Toronto.
Past perfect progressive is formed by had, the grammatical particle been and the present participle of the main verb: You had been waiting. For negation, not is included before been: I had not been waiting. A question sentence is formed by starting with had: Had she been waiting?
If emphasis is put on the duration of a concluded action of the past, since and for are signal words for past perfect progressive: We had been waiting at the airport since the 9 P.M. flight. / They had been waiting for three hours now.
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Other Indo-European languages
• 2 African languages
• 3 Asian languages
• 4 Other language families
• 5 Creole languages
o 5.1 Belizean Creole
o 5.2 Singaporean English Creole
o 5.3 Hawaiian Creole English
o 5.4 Haitian Creole
• 6 References
• 7 External links

[edit] Other Indo-European languages
In non-Germanic Indo-European languages, past marking is typically combined with a distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect, with the former (the preterite or aorist) reserved for contained or completed actions in the past, and the other (the imperfect) used for noncontained or ongoing actions in the past. French for instance, has an imperfect of similar form to that of German but used only for past habitual contexts like "I used to...". Similar patterns extend across most languages of the Indo-European family right through to the Indic languages.
Unlike other Indo-European languages, in Slavic languages tense is independent of aspect, with imperfective and perfective aspects being indicated instead by means of prefixes, stem changes, or suppletion. In many West Slavic and East Slavic languages, the early Slavic past tenses have largely merged into a single past tense. In West Slavic, person is indicated by conjugation of an auxiliary verb (employing the verb 'to be'). In Polish this auxiliary has evolved into a clitic which may attach to the main verb or alternatively to other parts of the sentence such as pronouns or conjunctions. Languages using either an auxiliary verb or clitic often drop the pronoun as it is not necessary to indicate person. By contrast, East Slavic languages have dropped the auxiliary completely and indicate person by means of obligatory pronouns. In both West and East Slavic, verbs in the past tense are conjugated for gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and number (singular, plural).
[edit] African languages
Whilst in Semitic languages tripartite non-past/past imperfective/past perfective systems similar to those of most Indo-European languages are found, in the rest of Africa past tenses have very different forms from those found in European languages. Berber languages have only the perfective/imperfective distinction and lack a past imperfect.
Many non-Bantu Niger-Congo languages of West Africa do not mark past tense at all and only have a form of perfect derived from a word meaning "to finish". Others, such as Ewe, distinguish only between future and non-future.
In complete contrast, Bantu languages such as Zulu have not only a past tense, but also a less remote proximal tense which is used for very recent past events and is never interchangeable with the ordinary past form. These languages also differ substantially from European languages in coding tense with prefixes instead of such suffixes as English -ed.
Other, smaller language families of Africa follow quite regional patterns. Thus the Sudanic languages of East Africa and adjacent Afro-Asiatic families are part of the same area with inflectional past-marking that extends into Europe, whereas more westerly Nilo-Saharan languages often do not have past
[edit] Asian languages
Past tenses in the sense used within European languages are found within the vast Asian landmass only among the Dravidian languages and languages of the northern half, such as the Uralic, Mongolic, as well as Filipino language and Korean. Languages in southeast Asia typically do not distinguish tense; in Chinese, for example, the particle 了le instead indicates perfective aspect.
In parts of islands in South East Asia, even less distinction is made, for instance in Indonesian and some other Austronesian languages. Past tenses, do, however, exist in most Oceanic languages.
[edit] Other language families
Among Native American languages there is a split between complete absence of past marking (especially common in Mesoamerica and the Pacific Northwest) and very complex tense marking with numerous specialised remoteness distinctions, as found for instance in Athabaskan languages and a few languages of the Amazon Basin. Some of these tenses can have specialised mythological significance and uses.
A number of Native American languages like Northern Paiute stand in contrast to European notions of tense because they always use relative tense, which means tense relative to a reference point other than the time an utterance is made.
Papuan languages of New Guinea almost always have remoteness distinctions in the past tense (though none are as elaborate as some native American languages), whilst indigenous Australian languages usually have a single past tense without remoteness distinctions.
[edit] Creole languages
Creole languages tend to make tense marking optional, and when tense is marked invariant pre-verbal markers are used.[3]
[edit] Belizean Creole
In Belizean Creole, past tense marking is optional and is rarely used if a semantic temporal marker such as yestudeh "yesterday" is present.
[edit] Singaporean English Creole
Singaporean English Creole (Singlish) optionally marks the past tense, most often in irregular verbs (e.g., go → went) and regular verbs like accept which require an extra syllable for the past tense suffix -ed.
[edit] Hawaiian Creole English
Hawaiian Creole English[4] optionally marks the past tense with the invariant pre-verbal marker wen or bin (especially older speakers) or haed (especially on the island Kauai). (Ai wen si om "I saw him"; Ai bin klin ap mai ples for da halade "I cleaned up my place for the holiday"; De haed plei BYU laes wik "They played BYU last week"). The past habitual marker is yustu (Yo mada yustu tink so "Your mother used to think so").
[edit] Haitian Creole
Haitian Creole[5] can indicate past tense with the pre-verbal marker te (Li te vini "He (past) come", "He came").
[edit] References
1. ^ a b Comrie, Bernard, Tense, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985.
2. ^ Comrie, Bernard, Aspect, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976.
3. ^ Holm, John, Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000: ch. 6.
4. ^ Sakoda, Kent, and Siegel, Jeff, Pidgin Grammar, Bess Press, 2003: pp. 38ff.
5. ^ Turnbull, Wally R., Creole Made Easy, Light Messages, 2000: p. 13.