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Example Verb Conjugations in Ngarla [12] Class Present Remote Past Past Past Continuous Habitual Future Speculative Purposive Optative Present Contrafactual Past Contrafactual Anticipatory L-rri -rnta -rnu -yinyu -yirnta -n -mpi -lu -nmara -rrima -nmarnta -rnamarta jaa-rri: jaa-rnta: jaa-rnu: jaa-yinyu: jaa-yirnta: jaa-n: jaa-mpi: jaa-lu: jaa ...
It should be noted that, since the distinction between tense, mood and aspect in grammar is sometimes fuzzy, some may disagree with some of the below categorisations. Pages in category "Grammatical tenses"
Examples which combine both types of tense marking include the French passé composé, which has an auxiliary verb together with the inflected past participle form of the main verb; and the Irish past tense, where the proclitic do (in various surface forms) appears in conjunction with the affixed or ablaut-modified past tense form of the main verb.
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).
An example of past imperfect tense in English which is often said to have a discontinuous meaning is the English past tense with "used to": I used to live in London. This tense normally carries an implication that the speaker no longer lives in London, although, as Comrie points out, [11] this implication is not absolute. For example, the ...
The past progressive or past continuous construction combines progressive aspect with past tense, and is formed using the past tense of be (was or were) with the present participle of the main verb. It indicates an action that was ongoing at the past time being considered: At three o'clock yesterday, I was working in the garden.
The simple past is used when the event happened at a particular time in the past, or during a period which ended in the past (i.e. a period that does not last up until the present time). This time frame may be explicitly stated, or implicit in the context (for example the past tense is often used when describing a sequence of past events). [7]