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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 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.
Regular verbs have identical past tense and past participle forms in -ed, but there are 100 or so irregular English verbs with different forms (see list). The verbs have, do and say also have irregular third-person present tense forms (has, does /dʌz/, says /sɛz/).
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).
English has no general imperfective and expresses it in different ways. The term "imperfect" in English refers to forms much more commonly called past progressive or past continuous (e.g. "was doing" or "were doing"). These are combinations of past tense with specifically continuous or progressive aspect.
The past continuous tense refers to actions that continued for a period of time, as in the sentence "she was walking," which describes an action that was still happening in a prior window of time to which a speaker is presently referring. The past perfect tense is used to describe actions that were already completed by a specific point in the past.
The progressive in English-based Atlantic Creoles often uses de (from English "be"). Jamaican Creole uses a (from English "are") or de for the present progressive and a combination of the past time marker (did, behn, ehn or wehn) and the progressive marker (a or de) for the past progressive (e.g. did a or wehn de).
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
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related to: past progressive tenses worksheets pdf englishThis site is a teacher's paradise! - The Bender Bunch