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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 verb read /ɹiːd/ has the same spelling in all three forms, but not the same pronunciation for the past tense and past participle /ɹɛd/, as it exhibits vowel shortening. In a few cases the past tense of an irregular verb has the same form as the infinitive of a different verb.
meet: AmE uses intransitively meet followed by with to mean "to have a meeting with", as for business purposes (Yesterday we met with the CEO), and reserves transitive meet for the meanings "to be introduced to" (I want you to meet the CEO; she is such a fine lady), "to come together with (someone, somewhere)" (Meet the CEO at the train station ...
English is an example of a language with no general imperfective. The English progressive is used to describe ongoing events, but can still be used in past tense, such as "The rain was beating down". Habitual situations do not have their own verb form (in most dialects), but the construction "used to" conveys past habitual action, as in I used ...
Regular in past tense and sometimes in past participle. must – (no other forms) Defective: Originally a preterite; see English modal verbs: need (needs/need) – needed – needed: Weak: Regular except in the use of need in place of needs in some contexts, by analogy with can, must, etc; [4] see English modal verbs: ought – (no other forms ...
The past perfect, sometimes called the pluperfect, combines past tense with perfect aspect; it is formed by combining had (the past tense of the auxiliary have) with the past participle of the main verb. It is used when referring to an event that took place prior to the time frame being considered. [10]
In the first sentence (present continuous tense) the agent is in the nominative case (k'aci ). In the second sentence, which shows ergative alignment, the root is marked with the ergative suffix -ma. However, there are some intransitive verbs in Georgian that behave like transitive verbs, and therefore employ the ergative case in the past tense.
The word "hoist" here is the past participle of the now-archaic verb hoise (since Shakespeare's time, hoist has become the present tense of the verb, with hoisted the past participle), and carries the meaning "to lift and remove". [18]