Several languages closely related to English have a well-developed imperfect tense, a tense that shows a past action or condition as incomplete, continuous, or coincident with another action. This is true with Spanish, Italian, and French; in contrast, English doesn’t inflect its verbs for the imperfect, in much the same way that it doesn’t for its future tense.
The farthest English has gone to formally capture the essence of the imperfect—the past imperfect in particular—is
the past progressive. The English past progressive, of course, either shows an action in progress at a specific time in the past, or one that was in progress in the past when another action happened or interrupted it.
To better understand how English evokes the imperfect tense, let’s distinguish first between the “imperfect” and “perfect” in traditional grammar. Recall that verbs, apart from indicating the time element, also conveys other information about the verb’s action. This information, called
aspect, shows whether the action is continuous, complete or incomplete, in progress, or habitual. Some languages have several of these aspects, but English has only two aspects:
the perfect, which refers to a past action that was completed or “perfected,” as in “She
danced with me,” and
the imperfect, which refers to a past action that was still in progress or was incomplete, as in “She
was dancing with me.”
THE ENGLISH PAST IMPERFECT EVOKES UNFINISHED UNFOLDING ACTION
The imperfect aspect of English verbs is actually formed grammatically in the same way as their
past progressive, which simply combines the past tense of the verb “be” with the main verb’s -ing or present participle form. Also called
the continuous participle, this basic form of the English imperfect is meant to describe an action or event that was in progress in the past. In the past imperfect, however,
the unfolding action or event was unfinished or interrupted, not “perfected,” as in “We
were touring Paris when the recall order came.”
In English, a simple past progressive statement like “We
were touring Paris” isn’t enough to establish the past imperfect aspect. It always needs a time frame established by another past action or condition. Thus, the statement “We were touring Paris” is meaningful only in the context of being an answer to a previously asked question like, say, “
What were you doing when the recall order came?” That question, in tandem with the past progressive “
We were touring Paris,” establishes the statement’s imperfect aspect.
The past progressive is, thankfully for users of English, not the only way English can evoke the past imperfect. To compensate for its inability to inflect verbs for the various shades of this aspect, the language came up with three other ways of capturing the sense of continuous, incomplete, or coincident past actions. They are as follows:
“ Used” + the verb’s infinitive form. This form expresses repeated, regular, or habitual actions or situations in the past: “We
used to dance all night every summer.” “Dreams of Vermont winters
used to obsess me in my youth.” “The couple
used to host lavish parties until the Asian economic crisis crippled their export business.”
“ Would” + the verb’s basic form (the verb stem). “
We would dance all night every summer.” One caveat here: the past imperfect usage of “would” isn’t the same as its conditional usage, as in “
If the weather were clear,
we would dance all night at the terrace.”
The verb’s simple past tense + an adverb of frequency. “
We were always dancing partners in our younger days.” “
We rarely complained whenever she made impossible demands.”
To sum up, the English past imperfect always conveys the idea of someone doing something or something happening when something else happened. Its job is always to emphasize the continuation or interruption of a past action.
(Next:
Can an adjective be used as a subject in a sentence?) September 26, 2019
This essay, 1,161st of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the September 19, 2019 print edition of The Manila Times
, © 2019 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
