Many of us who write and speak in English will likely be surprised when told that unlike the Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian among them), English doesn’t have a well-developed past imperfect tense. Verbs in the Roman languages typically inflect for the past imperfect to describe continuous situations incomplete, or coincident actions in the past, but English verbs don’t inflect at all for this tense in much the same way that it doesn’t for the future tense. Instead, what English does to evoke the past imperfect is to combine the past progressive form of the main verb with the past tense forms of the verb “be.”
To better understand how the imperfect tense works, let’s first formally distinguish between the “imperfect” and “perfect” in grammar. As we know, verbs typically inflect to indicate the time element and the so-called aspect of the action, which indicates whether it’s continuous, complete or incomplete, in progress, or habitual. Verbs in the Romance languages inflect to denote most of these aspects, but English does for only two — the perfect, for a past action that was completed or “perfected,” as in “He cooperated with us,” and the imperfect, for a past action that was still in progress or uncompleted, as in “He was cooperating with us.”
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