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The past perfect progressive or past perfect continuous (also known as the pluperfect progressive or pluperfect continuous) combines perfect progressive aspect with past tense. It is formed by combining had (the past tense of auxiliary have), been (the past participle of be), and the present participle of the main verb.
The past perfect progressive (sometimes referred to as the past perfect continuous) combines had (the simple past of have) with been (the past participle of be) and the present participle of the main verb: You had been waiting. It is used to refer to an ongoing action that continued up to the past time of reference.
In English grammar, the pluperfect (e.g. "had written") is now usually called the past perfect, since it combines past tense with perfect aspect. (The same term is sometimes used in relation to the grammar of other languages.) English also has a past perfect progressive (or past perfect continuous) form: "had been writing".
Although English largely separates tense and aspect formally, its aspects (neutral, progressive, perfect, progressive perfect, and [in the past tense] habitual) do not correspond very closely to the distinction of perfective vs. imperfective that is found in most languages with aspect. Furthermore, the separation of tense and aspect in English ...
However other state verbs use the present progressive or present simple depending on whether the state is considered temporary or permanent: The pen is lying on the table; Paris lies on the Seine. For past actions or states, the simple past is generally used: He went out an hour ago; Columbus knew the shape of the world.
Regular verbs form the simple past end-ed; however there are a few hundred irregular verbs with different forms. [2] The spelling rules for forming the past simple of regular verbs are as follows: verbs ending in -e add only –d to the end (e.g. live – lived, not *liveed), verbs ending in -y change to -ied (e.g. study – studied) and verbs ending in a group of a consonant + a vowel + a ...
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French is an example of a language where, as in German, the simple morphological perfective past (passé simple) has mostly given way to a compound form (passé composé). Irish, a Celtic language, has past, present and future tenses (see Irish conjugation). The past contrasts perfective and imperfective aspect, and some verbs retain such a ...