650: Past Tense Sep 18, 2016

The past tense is perhaps the easiest to define of the 3 (or 2) tenses in English. Most denote activity, or quality that happened and ended in the past. Still, there are multiple ways that this can be interpreted. Events, as well as habitual actions can be expressed like this quite simply. Nevertheless, the past tense has other uses. For example, the past tense can be used to indicate present or future time. The attitudinal past, as it's called, is used to reflect a lack of definitiveness, such as in, "did you want to have ice-cream?" because it is less blunt than the present tense in some cases. With indirect speech, certain verbs like 'say' allow the speaker to use the past tense to report the present, such as, "did you say you had ice-cream", which pragmatically asks whether the listener currently has ice-cream.