The past tense is a
grammatical tenseA tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...
that places an action or situation in the past of the current moment (in an absolute tense system), or prior to some specified time that may be in the speaker's past, present, or future (in a relative tense system). Not all languages mark verbs for the past tense (Mandarin Chinese, for example, does not); in some languages, the grammatical expression of past tense is combined with the expression of
moodMood may refer to:*Mood , a relatively long lasting emotional state*Grammatical mood, one of a set of morphologically distinctive forms that are used to signal modality*Mood , a city in Iran*Mood District, a district in Iran...
and/or
aspectAspect may be:*Aspect , a feature that is linked to many parts of a program, but which is not necessarily the primary function of the program...
(see tense–aspect–mood). Some languages that mark for past tense do so by inflecting the verb, while others do so by using auxiliary verbs (and some do both).
Germanic languages
The European continent is heavily dominated by
Indo-European languagesThe Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
, all of which have a past tense. In some cases the tense is formed
inflectionIn grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
ally as in English see/saw or walk/walked and as in the
FrenchFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
imperfect form, and sometimes it is formed periphrastically, as in the French passé composé form. Further, all of the non-Indo-European languages in Europe, such as
BasqueBasque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 25.7% of Basques in all territories...
,
HungarianHungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
, and
FinnishFinnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
, also have a past tense.
English
In English, the so-called
simple pastThe simple past, sometimes called the preterite, is the past tense of Modern English. It is used to describe events in the past. It may combine with either or both of two aspects, the perfect and the progressive...
form, sometimes called the
preteriteThe preterite is the grammatical tense expressing actions that took place or were completed in the past...
, is a true tense in that its use always places the action in the past. The present perfect form is an
aspectAspect may be:*Aspect , a feature that is linked to many parts of a program, but which is not necessarily the primary function of the program...
that relates the past to the present; it specifies a present state that results from past action, and as such it is a form of present tense even though it makes reference to past action. It can be altered to move the time that the state is experienced to the past. The other basic form of English verbs is the progressive aspect form, which shows ongoing action; this too can be altered to place the action in the past. English also has two forms, one of them unique to the past, that indicate past
habitualIn linguistics, the aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state. As its name suggests, the habitual aspect specifies an action as occurring habitually: the subject performs the action usually, ordinarily, or customarily...
action.
- The simple past is formed for regular verb
A regular verb is any verb whose conjugation follows the typical grammatical inflections of the language to which it belongs. A verb that cannot be conjugated like this is called an irregular verb. All natural languages, to different extents, have a number of irregular verbs...
s 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 putting 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? The simple past is used for describing acts that have already been concluded, regardless of whether they took place habituallyIn linguistics, the aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state. As its name suggests, the habitual aspect specifies an action as occurring habitually: the subject performs the action usually, ordinarily, or customarily...
or are viewed as a single occurrence seen as a unitThe perfective aspect , sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect used to describe a situation viewed as a simple whole, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. The perfective aspect is equivalent to the aspectual component of past perfective forms...
(but not if they are viewed as having occurred continuously). It is commonly used in storytelling.
- The past progressive is formed by using a simple past form of to be (was or were) and the main verb’s present participle: He was going to church. This form indicates that an action was continuously ongoing. By inserting not before the main verb a negation is achieved. Example: He was not going to church. A question is formed by fronting the simple past form of to be as in Was he going?.
- The past habitual can be formed in one of two ways. One construction is formed by used to plus the bare form of the main verb (or, technically and equivalently, by used plus the to-infinitive of the main verb). With an action verb it indicates that something occurred repetitively, as in I used to go there, while with a stative verb
A stative verb is one that asserts that one of its arguments has a particular property . Statives differ from other aspectual classes of verbs in that they are static; that is, they have undefined duration...
it indicates that a state was continuously in effect, as in I used to belong to that club. The used to form can be used whether or not the specific time frame of the action is specified (I used to go there; I used to go there every Friday in June). The negation of this form is exemplified by I used not to go there, although in informal usage I didn't use to go there is frequently heard. The interrogative form Used you to go there? is rare; the informal alternative Did you use to go there? is sometimes heard.
- The other past habitual form uses the auxiliary verb
In linguistics, an auxiliary verb is a verb that gives further semantic or syntactic information about a main or full verb. In English, the extra meaning provided by an auxiliary verb alters the basic meaning of the main verb to make it have one or more of the following functions: passive voice,...
would (which has other uses as well). For example, Last June I would go there daily conveys repetitive action. When this form is used, it must be accompanied by an explicit time frame (so for example I would go there. does not occur unless the time frame has already been specified). This form is negated as in Last June I would not go there daily, and it is made interrogative as in Last June, would you go there daily?.
- The 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. This form conveys that an action occurred before a specified time in the past, so it is actually a "past of the past" tense. A negation is achieved by including not after had: You had not spoken. Questions in past perfect always start with had: Had he laughed?
- The past perfect progressive is formed by had (the simple past of to have), been (the past participle of to be) and the present participle of the main verb: You had been waiting. This form describes action which happened in continuous fashion prior to some time in the past. 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 an action that continued to the reference time in the past, since and for are signal words for the past perfect progressive: We had been waiting at the airport since the 9 P.M. flight; We had been waiting there for three hours.
German
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
uses two forms for the past tense.
- The preterite (Präteritum) (called the "imperfect" in older grammar books, but this, a borrowing from Latin terminology, ill describes it.)
In South
GermanyGermany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
,
AustriaAustria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
and
SwitzerlandSwitzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
, the preterite 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 as
YiddishYiddish is a High German language of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages...
, and Swiss German have no preterite, but only perfect constructs.
In certain regions, a few specific verbs are used in the preterite, for instance the modal verbs and the verbs haben (have) and sein (be).
- Es gab einmal ein kleines Mädchen, das Rotkäppchen hieß. (There was once a small girl who was called Little Red Riding Hood.)
In speech and informal writing, the Perfekt is used (eg, Ich habe dies und das gesagt. (I said this and that)).
However, in the colloquial language of North Germany, there is still a very important difference between the preterite and the perfect, 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.
- Preterite: "Heute früh kam mein Freund." (my friend came early in the morning, and he is being talked about strictly in the past)
- Perfect: "Heute früh ist mein Freund gekommen." (my friend came early in the morning, but he is being talked about in the present)
Dutch
DutchDutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
also has 2 main past tenses:
- onvoltooid verleden tijd, which matches the English simple past and the German preterite, for example: Gisteren was ik daar ("I was there yesterday").
- voltooid tegenwoordige tijd, a present tense with the meaning of perfect. This form is made by combining a form of zijn ("to be") or hebben ("to have") with the notional verb, for example: Gisteren ben ik daar geweest. This also means "I was there yesterday", but just as it is the case for English constructions with the present perfect simple, this kind of formulation puts more emphasis on the "being finished"-aspect.
Non-Germanic Indo-European languages
In non-Germanic
Indo-European languagesThe Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
, past marking is typically combined with a distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect, with the former reserved for single completed actions in the past.
FrenchFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
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 the Indic languages.
Unlike other Indo-European languages, in
Slavic languagesThe Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia.-Branches:Scholars traditionally divide Slavic...
tense is independent of
aspectIn linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state, from the point of view of the speaker...
, with imperfective and perfective aspects being indicated instead by means of prefixes, stem changes, or
suppletionIn linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even "highly irregular". The term "suppletion" implies...
. In many
West SlavicWest Slavic can refer to:* West Slavic languages* West Slavic peoples...
and
East SlavicEast Slavic can refer to:* East Slavic languages* East Slavic peoples...
languages, the early Slavic past tenses have largely merged into a single past tense. In both West and East Slavic, verbs in the past tense are conjugated for
genderGrammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
(masculine, feminine, neuter) and
numberIn linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
(singular, plural).
French
FrenchFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
has numerous forms of the past tense including but not limited to:
- Past perfective (passé composé) e.g. J'ai mangé (I ate, using the form but not the meaning of I have eaten)
- Past imperfective (imparfait) e.g. Je mangeais (I was eating)
- Past historic or Simple past (passé simple) e.g. Je mangeai (I ate) (literary only)
- Pluperfect (Plus que parfait) e.g. J'avais mangé (I had eaten [before another event in the past])
- Recent past (passé recent) e.g. Je viens de manger (I just ate)
African languages
Whilst in
Semitic languagesThe Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 270 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa...
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 languagesThe Berber languages are a family of languages indigenous to North Africa, spoken from Siwa Oasis in Egypt to Morocco , and south to the countries of the Sahara Desert...
have only the perfective/imperfective distinction and lack a past imperfect.
Many non-Bantu
Niger–Congo languagesThe Niger–Congo languages constitute one of the world's major language families, and Africa's largest in terms of geographical area, number of speakers, and number of distinct languages. They may constitute the world's largest language family in terms of distinct languages, although this question...
of West Africa do not mark past tense at all but instead have a form of perfect derived from a word meaning "to finish". Others, such as
EweEwe is a Niger–Congo language spoken in Ghana, Togo and Benin by approximately six million people. Ewe is part of a cluster of related languages commonly called Gbe, spoken in southeastern Ghana, Togo, and parts of Benin. Other Gbe languages include Fon, Gen, Phla Phera, and Aja...
, distinguish only between
futureIn grammar, a future tense is a verb form that marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future , or to happen subsequent to some other event, whether that is past, present, or future .-Expressions of future tense:The concept of the future,...
and
non-futureA nonfuture tense is a grammatical tense that distinguishes a verbal action as having taken place in times past or times present, as opposed to future tense.http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsNonfutureTense.htm The tense is found in the Rukai, a language of Taiwan....
.
In complete contrast,
Bantu languagesThe Bantu languages constitute a traditional sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages...
such as
ZuluZulu is the language of the Zulu people with about 10 million speakers, the vast majority of whom live in South Africa. Zulu is the most widely spoken home language in South Africa as well as being understood by over 50% of the population...
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
prefixA prefix is an affix which is placed before the root of a word. Particularly in the study of languages,a prefix is also called a preformative, because it alters the form of the words to which it is affixed.Examples of prefixes:...
es instead of such suffixes as English -ed.
Other, smaller language families of Africa follow quite regional patterns. Thus the
Sudanic languagesIn early twentieth century classification of African languages, Sudanic languages was a generic term for African languages spoken in the Sahel belt from Ethiopia in the east to Senegal in the west.-Scope:...
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.
Asian languages
Past tenses are found in a variety of Asian languages. These include the Indo-European languages
RussianRussian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
in North Asia and
PersianPersian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
,
TajikTajik, Tajik Persian, or Tajiki, is a variety of modern Persian spoken in Central Asia. Historically Tajiks called their language zabani farsī , meaning Persian language in English; the term zabani tajikī, or Tajik language, was introduced in the 20th century by the Soviets...
, Urdu, and Hindi in Southwest and South Asia; the
Turkic languagesThe Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...
TurkishTurkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
,
TurkmenTurkmen is the national language of Turkmenistan...
,
KazakhKazakh is a Turkic language which belongs to the Kipchak branch of the Turkic languages, closely related to Nogai and Karakalpak....
, and
UyghurUyghur , formerly known as Eastern Turk, is a Turkic language with 8 to 11 million speakers, spoken primarily by the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Western China. Significant communities of Uyghur-speakers are located in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and various other...
of Southwest and Central Asia;
ArabicArabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
in Southwest Asia;
Japaneseis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
; the
Dravidian languagesThe Dravidian language family includes approximately 85 genetically related languages, spoken by about 217 million people. They are mainly spoken in southern India and parts of eastern and central India as well as in northeastern Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iran, and...
of India; the
Uralic languagesThe Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...
of Russia;
MongolicThe Mongolic languages are a group of languages spoken in East-Central Asia, mostly in Mongolia and surrounding areas plus in Kalmykia. The best-known member of this language family, Mongolian, is the primary language of most of the residents of Mongolia and the Mongolian residents of Inner...
; and
KoreanKorean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
. Languages in
East AsiaEast Asia or Eastern Asia is a subregion of Asia that can be defined in either geographical or cultural terms...
and
Southeast AsiaSoutheast Asia, South-East Asia, South East Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China, east of India, west of New Guinea and north of Australia. The region lies on the intersection of geological plates, with heavy seismic...
typically do not distinguish tense; in Mandarin Chinese, for example, the particle 了le when used immediately after a verb instead indicates
perfective aspectThe perfective aspect , sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect used to describe a situation viewed as a simple whole, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. The perfective aspect is equivalent to the aspectual component of past perfective forms...
.
In parts of islands in Southeast Asia, even less distinction is made, for instance in
IndonesianIndonesian is the official language of Indonesia. Indonesian is a normative form of the Riau Islands dialect of Malay, an Austronesian language which has been used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries....
and some other
Austronesian languagesThe Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia that are spoken by about 386 million people. It is on par with Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic and Uralic as one of the...
. Past tenses, do, however, exist in most
Oceanic languages.
The Americas
Among
Native American languagesIndigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land masses which constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language...
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 languagesAthabaskan or Athabascan is a large group of indigenous peoples of North America, located in two main Southern and Northern groups in western North America, and of their language family...
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 time relative to a reference point that may not coincide with the time an utterance is made.
New Guinea
Papuan languagesThe Papuan languages are those languages of the western Pacific which are neither Austronesian nor Australian. The term does not presuppose a genetic relationship. The concept of Papuan peoples as distinct from Melanesians was first suggested and named by Sidney Herbert Ray in 1892.-The...
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.
Creole languages
Creole languageA creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
s tend to make tense marking optional, and when tense is marked invariant pre-verbal markers are used.
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.
Singaporean English Creole
Singaporean English Creole (
SinglishColloquial Singaporean English, also known as Singlish, is an English-based creole language spoken in Singapore.Singlish is commonly regarded with low prestige in Singapore. The Singaporean government and many Singaporeans alike heavily discourage the use of Singlish in favour of Standard English...
) 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.
Hawaiian Creole English
Hawaiian Creole English 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").
Haitian Creole
Haitian Creole can indicate past tense with the pre-verbal marker te (Li te vini "He (past) come", "He came").
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