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The simple past or past indefinite, sometimes called the preterite, is the basic form of the past tense in Modern English. It is used principally to describe events in the past, although it also has some other uses. Regular English verbs form the simple past in -ed; however, there are a few hundred irregular verbs with different forms. The term "simple" is used to distinguish the syntactical construction whose basic form uses the plain past tense alone, from other past tense constructions which use auxiliaries in combination with participles, such as the past perfect and past progressive. Regular verbs form the simple past end-ed; however there are a few hundred irregular verbs with different forms. 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 consonant double the final consonant (e.g. stop – stopped). For details see . Most verbs have a single form of the simple past, independent of the person or number of the subject (there is no addition of -s for the third person singular as in the simple present). However, the copula verb be has two past tense forms: was for the first and third persons singular, and were in other instances. The form were can also be used in place of was in conditional clauses and the like; for information on this, see English subjunctive. This is the only case in modern English where a distinction in form is made between inversion, negations with not, and emphatic forms of the simple past use the auxiliary did. For details of this mechanism, see do-support. A full list of forms is given below, using the (regular) verb help as an example: Basic simple past: I/you/he/she/it/we/they helped Expanded (emphatic) simple past: I/you/he/she/it/we/they did help Question form: Did I/you/he/she/it/we/they help? Negative: I/you/he/she/it/we/they did not (didn't) help Negative question: Did I/you/he/she/it/we/they not help? / Didn't I/you/he/she/it/we/they help? Base form Affirmative (+) S + verb(ed) + c Negative (-) S + did not ( didn't) + verb + C The simple past is used for a single event (or sequence of such events) in the past, and also for past habitual actions: He took the money and ran.

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This paper presents manual and automatic annotation experiments for a pragmatic verb tense feature (narrativity) in English/French parallel corpora. The feature is considered to play an important role for translating English Simple Past tense into French, ...

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Detecting Narrativity to Improve English to French Translation of Simple Past Verbs

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The correct translation of verb tenses ensures that the temporal ordering of events in the source text is maintained in the target text. This paper assesses the utility of automatically labeling English Simple Past verbs with a binary discursive feature, n ...

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Habitual aspect

In linguistics, the aspect of a verb is a that defines the temporal flow (or lack thereof) in a given action, event, or state. As its name suggests, the habitual aspect (abbreviated ), not to be confused with iterative aspect or frequentative aspect, specifies an action as occurring habitually: the subject performs the action usually, ordinarily, or customarily. As such, the habitual aspect provides structural information on the nature of the subject referent, "John smokes" being interpretable as "John is a smoker", "Enjoh habitually gets up early in the morning" as "Enjoh is an early bird".

Do-support

Do-support (periphrastic do or do-insertion), in English grammar, is the use of the auxiliary verb do, including its inflected forms does and did, to form negated clauses and questions as well as other constructions in which subject–auxiliary inversion is required. The verb "do" can be used as an auxiliary even in simple declarative sentences, and it usually serves to add emphasis, as in "I did shut the fridge." However, in the negated and inverted clauses referred to above, it is used because the conventions of Modern English syntax permit these constructions only when an auxiliary is present.

Copula (linguistics)

In linguistics, a copula (plural: copulas or copulae; abbreviated ) is a word or phrase that links the subject of a sentence to a subject complement, such as the word is in the sentence "The sky is blue" or the phrase was not being in the sentence "It was not being co-operative." The word copula derives from the Latin noun for a "link" or "tie" that connects two different things. A copula is often a verb or a verb-like word, though this is not universally the case. A verb that is a copula is sometimes called a copulative or copular verb.

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