The little-heralded past imperfect tense in English

A FEW days ago, a member of Jose Carillo’s English Forum, Justine Aragones, suggested that I write a column on the past imperfect tense. Hardly anybody has asked me about this tense over the past 14 years, likely because the unremarkable nature of its construction makes it seldom noticed or taught these days. I did write a column about it way back in 2004 and the piece subsequently formed part of my book Give Your English a Winning Edge, but that was all. So then, for the benefit of readers who’d like to get acquainted with this little-heralded tense, I’ll now do a quick review to differentiate it from the more familiar English tenses.

Unlike the Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian among them), English doesn’t have a well-developed past imperfect tense. Indeed, it doesn’t inflect verbs at all for this tense in much the same way that it doesn’t for the future tense. What English does to denote the past imperfect—the sense of continuous, incomplete, or coincident actions in the past—is to combine the past progressive form of the main verb with the past tense forms of the verb “be.”