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Thepast tense is agrammatical tense whose function is to place an action or situation in the past. Examples ofverbs in the past tense include the English verbssang,went andwashed. Most languages have a past tense, with some having several types in order to indicate how far back the action took place. Some languages have a compound past tense which usesauxiliary verbs as well as animperfect tense which expresses continuous or repetitive events or actions. Some languagesinflect the verb, which changes the ending to indicate the past tense, while non-inflected languages may use other words meaning, for example, "yesterday" or "last week" to indicate that something took place in the past.
In some languages, the grammatical expression of past tense is combined with the expression of othercategories such asgrammatical aspect (seetense–aspect). Thus a language may have several types of past tense form, their use depending on what aspectual or other additional information is to be encoded.French, for example, has a compound past(passé composé) for expressing completed events, andimperfect for continuous or repetitive events.
Some languages that grammaticalise for past tense do so byinflecting the verb, while others do soperiphrastically usingauxiliary verbs, also known as "verbal operators" (and some do both, as in the example of French given above). Not all languages grammaticalise verbs for past tense –Mandarin Chinese, for example, mainly uses lexical means (words like "yesterday" or "last week") to indicate that something took place in the past, although use can also be made of thetense/aspect markersle andguo.
The "past time" to which the past tense refers generally means the past relative to the moment of speaking, although in contexts whererelative tense is employed (as in some instances ofindirect speech) it may mean the past relative to some other time being under discussion.[1] A language's past tense may also have other uses besides referring to past time; for example, in English and certain other languages, the past tense is sometimes used in referring to hypothetical situations, such as incondition clauses likeIf you loved me ..., where the past tenseloved is used even though there may be no connection with past time.
Some languages grammatically distinguish the recent past from remote past with separate tenses. There may be more than two distinctions.
In some languages, certain past tenses can carry an implication that the result of the action in question no longer holds. For example, in the Bantu languageChichewa, use of the remote past tenseánáamwalíra "he died" would be surprising since it would imply that the person was no longer dead.[2] This kind of past tense is known asdiscontinuous past. Similarly certain imperfective past tenses (such as the English "used to") can carry an implication that the action referred to no longer takes place.[3]
A general past tense can be indicated with theglossing abbreviationPST.
The European continent is heavily dominated byIndo-European languages, all of which have a past tense. In some cases the tense is formedinflectionally as in Englishsee/saw orwalks/walked and as in theFrenchimperfect form, and sometimes it is formedperiphrastically, as in the Frenchpassé composé form. Further, all of the non-Indo-European languages in Europe, such asBasque,Hungarian, andFinnish, also have a past tense.
In English, the past tense (orpreterite) is one of theinflected forms of a verb. The past tense ofregular verbs is made by adding-d or-ed to the base form of the verb, while those ofirregular verbs are formed in various ways (such assee→saw,go→went,be→was/were). With regular and some irregular verbs, the past tense form also serves as apast participle. For full details of past tense formation, seeEnglish verbs.
Past events are often referred to using thepresent perfect construction, as inI have finished (also known aspresent in past). However this is not regarded as an instance of the past tense; instead it is viewed as a combination ofpresent tense with perfectaspect, specifying a present state that results from past action.[4] (It can be made into a past tense form by replacing the auxiliaryhave withhad; see below.)
Various multi-word constructions exist for combining past tense withprogressive (continuous) aspect, which denotes ongoing action; with perfect aspect; and with progressive and perfect aspects together. These and other common past tense constructions are listed below:[5][6]
For details of the usage of the various constructions used to refer to the past, seeUses of English verb forms. The past tense is also used in referring to some hypothetical situations, not necessarily connected with past time, as inif I tried orI wish I knew. (For the possible use ofwere in place ofwas in such instances, seeEnglish subjunctive.)
German uses three forms for the past tense.
In southernGermany,Austria andSwitzerland, thepreterite is mostly used solely in writing, for example in stories. Use in speech is regarded as snobbish and thus very uncommon. South German dialects, such as the Bavarian dialect, as well asYiddish and Swiss German, have no preterite (with the exception ofsein andwollen), but only perfect constructs.
In certain regions, a few specific verbs are used in the preterite, for instance the modal verbs and the verbshaben (have) andsein (be).
In speech and informal writing, thePerfekt is used (e.g., Ichhabe dies und dasgesagt. (I said this and that)).
However, in the oral mode of North Germany, there is still a very important difference between the preterite and theperfect, and both tenses are consequently very common. The preterite is used for past actions when the focus is on the action, whilst the present perfect is used for past actions when the focus is on the present state of the subject as a result of a previous action. This is somewhat similar to the English usage of the preterite and the present perfect.
The past perfect is used in every German speaking country and it is used to place an action in the past before another action in the past. It is formed with an auxiliary (haben/sein) and a past participle that is placed at the end of the clause.
Dutch mainly uses these two past tenses:
Less common is thevoltooid verleden tijd, which corresponds to the English past perfect. It is formed by combining anonvoltooid verleden form ofzijn ("to be") orhebben ("to have") with the notional verb, for example:Ikwas daar voor gisteren algeweest. This means "I had been there before yesterday." This tense is used to indicate that one action in the past occurred before another past action, and that the action was fully finished before the second action took place.
In non-GermanicIndo-European languages, past marking is typically combined with a distinction betweenperfective andimperfective aspect, with the former reserved for single completed actions in the past.French for instance, has an imperfect tense form similar to that of German but used only for past habitual or past progressive contexts like "I used to..." or "I was doing...". Similar patterns extend across most languages of the Indo-European family right through to theIndic languages.
Unlike other Indo-European languages, inSlavic languages tense is independent ofaspect, withimperfective andperfective aspects being indicated instead by means of prefixes, stem changes, orsuppletion. In manyWest Slavic andEast Slavic languages, theearly Slavic past tenses have largely merged into a single past tense. In both West and East Slavic, verbs in the past tense are conjugated forgender (masculine, feminine, neuter) andnumber (singular, plural).
French has numerous forms of the past tense including but not limited to:
Spanish andPortuguese have several forms of the past tense, which include but are not limited to:
A difference in the pluperfect occurs between Spanish and Portuguese; in the latter, a synthetic pluperfect exists which follows the imperfect conjugations, but -ra replaces the -va seen in the verb endings.
While inSemitic 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-BantuNiger–Congo languages of West Africa do not mark past tense at all but instead have a form ofperfect derived from a word meaning "to finish". Others, such asEwe, distinguish only betweenfuture andnon-future.
In complete contrast,Bantu languages such asZulu have not only a past tense, but also a less remoteproximal 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 withprefixes instead of such suffixes as English-ed.
Other, smaller language families of Africa follow quite regional patterns. Thus theSudanic 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 tense.
Past tenses are found in a variety of Asian languages. These include the Indo-European languagesRussian in North Asia andPersian,Urdu,Nepali andHindi in Southwest and South Asia; theTurkic languagesTurkish,Turkmen,Kazakh, andUyghur of Southwest and Central Asia;Arabic andHebrew in Southwest Asia;Japanese; theDravidian languages of India; theUralic languages of Russia;Mongolic; andKorean. Languages inEast Asia andSoutheast Asia typically do not distinguish tense; inMandarin Chinese, for example, the particle 了le when used immediately after a verb instead indicatesperfective aspect.
In parts of islands in Southeast Asia, even less distinction is made, for instance inIndonesian and some otherAustronesian languages. Past tenses, do, however, exist in mostOceanic languages.
AmongNative 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 inAthabaskan 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 userelative tense, which means time relative to a reference point that may not coincide with 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), whilstindigenous Australian languages usually have a single past tense without remoteness distinctions.
Creole languages tend to make tense marking optional, and when tense is marked invariant pre-verbal markers are used.[7]
InBelizean Creole, past tense marking is optional and is rarely used if a semantic temporal marker such asyestudeh "yesterday" is present.
Singaporean English Creole (Singlish) optionally marks the past tense, most often in irregular verbs (e.g.,go →went) and regular verbs likeaccept which require an extra syllable for the past tense suffix -ed.
Hawaiian Creole English[8] optionally marks the past tense with the invariant pre-verbal markerwen orbin (especially older speakers) orhaed (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 isyustu (Yo mada yustu tink so "Your mother used to think so").
Haitian Creole[9] can indicate past tense with the pre-verbal markerte (Li te vini "He (past) come", "He came").
