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This is followed by the simple past tense , and then the past participle. If there are irregular present tense forms (see below), these are given in parentheses after the infinitive. (The present participle and gerund forms of verbs, ending in -ing, are always regular. In English, these are used as verbs, adjectives, and nouns.)
Imperfect tense verbs represent a past process combined with so called imperfective aspect, that is, they often stand for an ongoing past action or state at a past point in time (see secondary present) or represent habitual actions (see Latin tenses with modality) (e.g. 'he was eating', 'he used to eat'). The perfect tense combines the meanings ...
For example, bore and found may be past tenses of bear and find, but may also represent independent (regular) verbs of different meaning. Another example is lay, which may be the past tense of lie, but is also an independent verb (regular in pronunciation, but with irregular spelling: lay–laid–laid).
The auxiliary language Interlingua has some irregular verbs, principally esser "to be", which has an irregular present tense form es "is" (instead of expected esse), an optional plural son "are", an optional irregular past tense era "was/were" (alongside regular esseva), and a unique subjunctive form sia (which can also function as an imperative).
In order to explain and understand present tense, it is useful to imagine time as a line on which the past tense, the present and the future tense are positioned. The term present tense is usually used in descriptions of specific languages to refer to a particular grammatical form or set of forms; these may have a variety of uses, not all of ...
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 past participle of regular verbs is identical to the preterite (past tense) form, described in the previous section. For irregular verbs, see English irregular verbs. Some of these have different past tense and past participle forms (like sing–sang–sung); others have the same form for both (like make–made–made).
Within the indicative mood, there is a present tense habitual aspect form (which can also be used with stative verbs), a past tense habitual aspect form (which also can be used with stative verbs), a near past tense form, a remote past tense form (which can also be used to convey past perspective on an immediately prior situation or event), a ...