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English also has a past perfect progressive (or past perfect continuous) construction, such as had been working. This is the past equivalent of the present perfect progressive, and is used to refer to an ongoing action that continued up to the past time of reference. For example: "It had been raining all night when he awoke."
The sentence can be given as a grammatical puzzle [7] [8] [9] or an item on a test, [1] [2] for which one must find the proper punctuation to give it meaning. Hans Reichenbach used a similar sentence ("John where Jack had...") in his 1947 book Elements of Symbolic Logic as an exercise for the reader, to illustrate the different levels of language, namely object language and metalanguage.
By yesterday morning they had already been working for twelve hours. Among the witnesses was John Smith, who had been staying at the hotel since July 10. This form is sometimes used for actions in the past that were interrupted by some event [12] (compare the use of the past progressive as given above). For example: I had been working on my ...
There is a subtle difference in usage between the case where the viewpoint is from the present and the case where it is from a point in the past: have been taking classes implies that the action is not only of present relevance but is continuing to occur; in contrast, had been taking classes indicates relevance at the reference time, and allows ...
[1]: 322 Conversely, British English favours fitted as the past tense of fit generally, whereas the preference of American English is more complex: AmE prefers fitted for the metaphorical sense of having made an object [adjective-]"fit" (i.e., suited) for a purpose; in spatial transitive contexts, AmE uses fitted for the sense of having made an ...
Other terms for the contrast lexical vs. grammatical include: situation vs. viewpoint and inner vs. outer. [10] [11] Lexical aspect, also known as Aktionsart, is an inherent property of a verb or verb-complement phrase, and is not marked formally. The distinctions made as part of lexical aspect are different from those of grammatical aspect.
More narrowly, participle has been defined as "a word derived from a verb and used as an adjective, as in a laughing face". [ 2 ] "Participle" is a traditional grammatical term from Greek and Latin that is widely used for corresponding verb forms in European languages and analogous forms in Sanskrit and Arabic grammar.
The base form or plain form of an English verb is not marked by any inflectional ending.. Certain derivational suffixes are frequently used to form verbs, such as -en (sharpen), -ate (formulate), -fy (electrify), and -ise/ize (realise/realize), but verbs with those suffixes are nonetheless considered to be base-form verbs.