BASIC MEANINGS OF THE PAST TENSE
The basic meaning of the Past tense in English is to locate an event or state in the past. It situates the event at a ‘temporal distance’ from the moment of speaking, whether in time, towards the past, or with regard to potential or hypothetical events which have not yet occurred in the present or the future.
When used to refer to a definite past event or state, the Past in English contains two semantic features:
• The speaker conceptualizes the event as having occurred at some specific time in the past.
• The event is presented as wholly located in the past, in a time-frame that is separated by a gap from the present.
These features are illustrated in the following examples:
James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882.
He lived in Ireland until 1904 and spent the rest of his life abroad.
The Past tense in English says nothing about whether the event occupied a point in time or a longer extent. These additional meanings are understood from the lexical verb used and from the whole situation represented by the clause. In the examples above referring to one single person, was born is interpreted as referring to a point in time, while lived and spent are interpreted as being of longer duration. With a plural subject, the Past tense were born is interpreted here as referring not to one single point in time but to many:
Generations of writers were born who were influenced by Joyce.
In using the Past tense, speakers do not need to specify a past occurrence by means of an Adjunct, however. As long as the speaker has a specific time in mind and can assume that the hearer infers this from the situational context, the Past tense is used, as in:
Did you see that flash of lightning?
[Who said that?] It wasn’t me.
