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Tense, aspect, and mood are usually indicated with separate invariant pre-verbal auxiliaries. Typically the unmarked verb is used for either the timeless habitual or the stative aspect or the past perfective tense–aspect combination. In general creoles tend to put less emphasis on marking tense than on marking aspect.
The marking of aspect is often conflated with the marking of tense and mood (see tense–aspect–mood). Aspectual distinctions may be restricted to certain tenses: in Latin and the Romance languages , for example, the perfective–imperfective distinction is marked in the past tense , by the division between preterites and imperfects .
Aspect [8] [10] expresses how the action or state occurs through time. Important examples include: perfective aspect, in which the action is viewed in its entirety through completion (as in "I saw the car") imperfective aspect, in which the action is viewed as ongoing; in some languages a verb could express imperfective aspect more narrowly as:
The perfect tense or aspect (abbreviated PERF or PRF) is a verb form that indicates that an action or circumstance occurred earlier than the time under consideration, often focusing attention on the resulting state rather than on the occurrence itself. An example of a perfect construction is I have made dinner.
A perfect tense does not necessarily have to be perfective in aspect. For example, "I have been waiting here for an hour" and "I have been going to that doctor all my life" are perfect but also imperfective in aspect. There are some languages, however, such as Modern Greek, in which the perfect tense is always perfective. [10]
The imperfective aspect may be fused with the past tense, for a form traditionally called the imperfect. In some cases, such as Spanish and Portuguese , this is because the imperfective aspect occurs only in the past tense; others, such as Georgian and Bulgarian , have both general imperfectives and imperfects.
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.
[Used to + infinitive] expresses the lexical verb’s habitual aspect in the past tense, and is in the indicative mood and active voice. In informal spoken English questions or negative statements, it is treated like neither a modal nor an auxiliary verb, but as a past tense of an ordinary verb. (Though informal, especially when the "d" is ...
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