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Similarly, the following two examples use different tenses, although the context is very similar and the meaning is the same: est quod domī dīcere paene fuī oblītus (Plautus) [225] 'there's something which I almost forgot to say (earlier) in the house (i.e. before we left the house)' oblītus intus dūdum tibi sum dīcere (Plautus) [226]
Imperfect meanings in English are expressed in different ways depending on whether the event is continuous or habitual.. For a continuous action (one that was in progress at a particular time in the past), the past progressive (past continuous) form is used, as in "I was eating"; "They were running fast."
say (and compounds such as "gainsay" and "naysay"): I say, you say, he says, we say, they say where "says" has the standard pronunciation / s ɛ z / (instead of / s eɪ z /) in contrast to the / s eɪ / used for the infinitive and other present tense forms.
Past continuous may refer to: Past continuous or past progressive, an English verb form (e.g. was writing) Verb forms with similar meaning in some other languages; see Imperfect; Past Continuous, a novel by Yaakov Shabtai; A Life Apart (novel), titled Past Continuous in its original release as a novel by Neel Mukherjee released in 2008
The simple past is used when the event is conceived as occurring at a particular time in the past, or during a period that ended in the past (i.e. it 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).
Another example can be found from Ket: [7] fèmba.di, “I am a Tungus” dɨ.fen, “I am standing” In Turkic, and a few Uralic and Australian Aboriginal languages, predicative adjectives and copular complements take affixes that are identical to those used on predicative verbs, but their negation is different. For example, in Turkish:
In recent work Maria Bittner and Judith Tonhauser have described the different ways in which tenseless languages nonetheless mark time. [4] [5] On the other hand, some languages make finer tense distinctions, such as remote vs recent past, or near vs remote future. Tenses generally express time relative to the moment of speaking. In some ...
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 ).