Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The past tense is a grammatical tense whose function is to place an action or situation in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs sang , went and washed . Most languages have a past tense, with some having several types in order to indicate how far back the action took place.
The sequence of tenses (known in Latin as consecutio temporum, and also known as agreement of tenses, succession of tenses and tense harmony) is a set of grammatical rules of a particular language, governing the agreement between the tenses of verbs in related clauses or sentences . A typical context in which rules of sequence of tenses apply ...
This is the case with certain strong verbs, where historical sound changes have led to a leveling of the vowel modifications: for example, let has both past tense and past participle identical to the infinitive, while come has the past participle identical (but a different past tense, came).
Relative tense and absolute tense are distinct possible uses of the grammatical category of tense. Absolute tense means the grammatical expression of time reference (usually past, present or future) relative to "now" – the moment of speaking. In the case of relative tense, the time reference is construed relative to a different point in time ...
The simple past, past simple, or past indefinite, in English equivalent to the preterite, is the basic form of the past tense in Modern English. It is used principally to describe events in the past, although it also has some other uses. [1] Regular English verbs form the simple past in -ed; however, there are a few hundred irregular verbs with ...
Future perfect. The future perfect is a verb form or construction used to describe an event that is expected or planned to happen before a time of reference in the future, such as will have finished in the English sentence "I will have finished by tomorrow." It is a grammatical combination of the future tense, or other marking of future time ...
The going-to future originated by the extension of the spatial sense of the verb go to a temporal sense (a common change, the same phenomenon can be seen in the preposition before ). The original construction involved physical movement with an intention, such as "I am going [outside] to harvest the crop." The location later became unnecessary ...
The passé simple is most often formed by dropping the last two letters off the infinitive form of the verb and adding the appropriate ending. The three main classes of French regular verbs ( -er, -ir, -re) are conjugated in the passé simple tense in the following way: chercher. je cherch ai. tu cherch as. il/elle cherch a.