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One feature of Catalan is the periphrastic preterite tense for referring to the remote past, which is constructed with characteristic present-tense forms of the verb anar (to go) and the infinitive of a verb (vaig parlar, vas/vares parlar, va parlar, vam/vàrem parlar, vau/vàreu parlar, van/varen parlar).
The past, also called preterite, is rarely used in the spoken and written language and the same applies for the past anterior in both indicative and subjunctive moods (because it has the past form of haver in the composite form). In the modern language, the periphrastic past and the periphrastic past anterior replace the past and the past anterior.
The Catalan verbal system is basically common to all Western Romance, except that most dialects replace the analytic perfect indicative with a periphrastic tense composed of vaig, vas (vares), va, vam (vàrem), vau (vàreu), van (varen) and the infinitive.
On another page, while Occitan uses exclusively the simple past tense, Catalan (most dialects) and Aragonese (Eastern dialects) use another past tense called the periphrastic past. This tense is made of the sum of the conjugation of the verb to go plus the verb performing the action in infinitive form:
Non-finite Form Infinitive: sentir: Gerund: sentint: Past participle: sentit (sentit, sentida, sentits, sentides) : Indicative jo tu ell / ella (vostè)nosaltres vosaltres (vós)ells / elles
In Valencian the simple past tense (e.g. cantà 'he sang') is more frequently used in speech than in Central Catalan, where the periphrastic past (e.g. va cantar 'he sang') is prevailing and the simple past mostly appears in written language. The same, however, may be said of the Balearic dialects.
However, the French and Catalan suffixes -ant conflate with the accusative of present active participle suffix -āntem, and so the gerund sounds like the present participle, but ever present with "en". The supine desappered, and remains just the past participle, with its stem, in all Romance languages.
There is a periphrastic past perfect as in modern Catalan: él/ell ba cantá/cantar (he sang). Conservation of the adverbial pronoun i (< IBI). Compared to the other dialects, more cases of evolution of the Latin endings -TY, -CE, -CI, -DE to -u, as in Catalan: peu (foot).