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In Portuguese, however, its use has become mostly literary, and particularly in spoken communication, the pluperfect is usually formed using the auxiliary verb ter, in the imperfect form (tinha tinhas tinha tínhamos tínheis tinham) plus the past participle. For example, Quando cheguei, soube que o meu amigo tinha morrido. A more formal way of ...
Further, where older or more literary French would have used the perfect form of the simple past tense (le passé antérieur) for the past-of-the-past, modern non-literary French uses the pluperfect (le plus-que-parfait; the perfect of the imperfect), or sometimes a new form called the surcomposé (literally, "over-compound"), which re-applies ...
Pluperfect (plus-que-parfait): literally "more than perfect", formed with an auxiliary verb in the imperfect; Simple past (passé simple) Conventionally used only in written language (especially in literature) or in extremely formal speech. Past perfect (passé antérieur): formed with an auxiliary verb in the simple past. It is somewhat rare.
The present perfect is a grammatical combination of the present tense and perfect aspect that is used to express a past event that has present consequences. [1] The term is used particularly in the context of English grammar to refer to forms like "I have finished".
French, for example, has a compound past (passé composé) for expressing completed events, and imperfect for continuous or repetitive events. Some languages that grammaticalise for past tense do so by inflecting the verb, while others do so periphrastically using auxiliary verbs , also known as "verbal operators" (and some do both, as in the ...
J'ai peur que cela ne se reproduise. — "I am afraid that it might happen again." Il est arrivé avant que nous n ' ayons commencé. — "He arrived before we started." Ils sont plus nombreux que tu ne le crois. — "There are more of them than you think." Expletive ne is found in finite subordinate clauses (never before an infinitive).
A famous example for lexical ambiguity is the following sentence: "Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen hinterher.", meaning "When flies fly behind flies, then flies fly in pursuit of flies." [40] [circular reference] It takes advantage of some German nouns and corresponding verbs being homonymous. While not noticeable ...
A sentence consisting of at least one dependent clause and at least two independent clauses may be called a complex-compound sentence or compound-complex sentence. Sentence 1 is an example of a simple sentence. Sentence 2 is compound because "so" is considered a coordinating conjunction in English, and sentence 3 is complex.