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The normal prose practice is to use either a past tense of dēbeō 'I have a duty to' or oportet 'it is proper' with the infinitive, or else a gerundive with a past tense of sum. The imperfect subjunctive can also be used to represent an imagined or wished for situation in present time: [337] utinam Servius Sulpicius vīveret! (Cicero) [338]
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
A distinction between perfective aspect (I did) and imperfective aspect (I was doing) is found only in the past in Latin. In the present or future, the same tenses have both aspectual meanings. Unlike in Ancient Greek or modern English, there is no distinction between perfect (I have done) and simple past (I did). The same tense, known in Latin ...
From a semantic perspective, a tense is a temporal circumstance in which an event takes place relative to a given point in time. [i] [ii] [iii] It is absolute (primary) if it relates the represented event to the time of the speech event [iv] [v] [vi] [vii] and it is relative if it relates the represented event to the time of another event in the context of discourse.
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"
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 ...
Verbal agreement, or concord, is a morpho-syntactic construct in which properties of the subject and/or objects of a verb are indicated by the verb form. Verbs are then said to agree with their subjects (resp. objects).
As stated above, verbless sentences occur only in the present tense thus, a formal nominal sentence in Arabic can never express something in the past tense. That is, the past feature has to always be indicated morphologically to convey accurate information of (+past), unlike the present which can be referred to as tenseless. [10] The following ...