III.

THE PRETERIT

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 III. THE PRETERIT

• Disclaimer:

• By now you should be familiar with every single irregular verb in the
English language.

• Your teachers will consider that you know them all when reading
your exam papers.

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 III. THE PRETERIT

• A word on spelling:

• ‘Preterite’ = more frequent in UK English.

• ‘Preterit’ = more frequent in US English (we’re lazy).

• It is also called the simple past, which SHOULD NOT be

confused with the French ‘passé simple’.
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 III. THE PRETERIT

• Preterit = praeter itus = ‘gone by’

• Note the affinity between space and time in French too: ‘passé’ also
means ‘gone by’.

• Linguistic definition: The preterit metaphorically refers to what is no

longer here, in other words what is no longer present.

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 III. THE PRETERIT

• The preterit is traditionally said to refer to a past event in its entirety.

• But the -ed morpheme is actually a marker of separation.

• The preterit thus refers to events that are disconnected from the
moment of utterance.

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 III. THE PRETERIT
• An event that is disconnected from the moment of utterance is logically not
present.

• Only the present is real.

• Therefore those events that are not present are either no longer present or
they are not real, i.e. they are hypothetical.

• A process that is not real is usually referred to as counterfactual (literally, it is

something that ‘goes against the facts’).
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 III. THE PRETERIT
• This means that the preterit has two different types of uses:

• A temporal use, for those events that are no longer real;

• A modal use, for those events that are counterfactual.

• (‘modal’ shares the same root with ‘mood’, as in ‘subjunctive mood’,

for instance.)
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 III. THE PRETERIT

• ‘Someone stole my credit card yesterday.’

• Temporal use: the process happened in the past.

• ‘If someone stole my credit card, I would call Chuck Norris.’

• Modal use: the process is purely hypothetical.

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 III. THE PRETERIT
• The simple past is used for:

1. Narrations

2. Past habits

3. Scheduled future in the past

4. Counterfactual processes

5. Politeness
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 III. THE PRETERIT
• Typical use of the simple past #1: narrations.

• The most frequent use of the simple past: referring to past events.

• The simple past is the story-telling tense par excellence.

• ‘Emma touched my arm. ‘Are you all right?’ she whispered. ‘You look pale.’ I
lied and said I was, and succeeded in faking allrightness for exactly three
more twists in the path […]’. Ransom Riggs, Hollow City, p.65.
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 III. THE PRETERIT

• For starters, when telling a story, one talks about events that have
already happened (supposedly).

• But that is not all.

• In a typical story, events follow one another: the end of one event
coincides with the beginning of another.

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 III. THE PRETERIT

‘Emma touched my arm. ‘Are you all right?’ she whispered. ‘You look pale.’ I lied and said I was.’

Process 1 Process 2 Process 3

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 III. THE PRETERIT

• This means that events in the past are located relative to one another.

• What about when there is only one process?

• ‘She knew the answer.’

• At some point in the past, the process stopped.

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 III. THE PRETERIT

• Typical use of the simple past #2: past habits.

• Just like the simple present, the simple past can be used to refer to a
series of recurring actions.

• But there is a major difference between the simple present and the
simple past:

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 III. THE PRETERIT
• ‘I drive to work’ = habit.

• ‘I drove to work’ = without further context, single event.

• → ‘I drove to work every evening.’

• This is an instance of what is called context-sensitive meaning.

The same utterance may be interpreted differently depending on the
context.
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 III. THE PRETERIT

• Note that the ambiguity is not always

present:

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 III. THE PRETERIT
• Typical use of the simple past #3: scheduled future in the past.

• Just like the simple present, the simple past can be used to refer to a process that has
been scheduled.

• ‘Mister Spock needs to hurry — the Enterprise leaves at 4:52.’

• ‘Mister Spock needed to hurry — the Enterprise left at 4:52.’

• The same thing happens in French: «  M. Spock doit se dépêcher ; l’Enterprise part à
16h52. » vs. « M. Spock devait se dépêcher ; l’Enterprise partait à 16h52. »
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 III. THE PRETERIT
• This use is found in a type of structure that sounds alien to French ears. Compare:
« Je partirai quand il appellera, » expliqua-t- Elle expliqua qu’elle partirait quand il
→
elle. appellerait.
She explained that she would leave when he
‘I will leave when he calls,’ she explained. →
called.

• In French, the conditional is used for what is sometimes referred to as «  le futur

dans le passé. »

• This is paralleled in English by the use of ‘would’ instead of ‘will’.

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 III. THE PRETERIT
• This use is found in a type of structure that sounds alien to French ears. Compare:
« Je partirai quand il appellera, » expliqua-t- Elle expliqua qu’elle partirait quand il
→
elle. appellerait.
She explained that she would leave when he
‘I will leave when he calls,’ she explained. →
called.

• But ‘will’ cannot appear in a subordinate clause.

• Since indirect speech causes every tense to be shifted towards the past, the verb in
the subordinate clause is put in the preterit.
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 III. THE PRETERIT
• This specificity can lead to structural ambiguity:

• ‘I thought she’d kill me when she saw me.’

• Is this a past version of ‘I thought: She will kill me when she sees me’?

• Or a past version of ‘When she saw me I thought: she will kill me’?

• It can be either, depending on the context.

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 III. THE PRETERIT

• When Emmanuel married Brigitte, he was 29 and she was 53. She
would be 84 when he turned 60.

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 III. THE PRETERIT

• One more example:

• ‘The Joker said he would kill everybody when Batman released him.’

• ‘Le Joker a dit qu’il tuerait tout le monde quand Batman l’a relâché.’

• ‘Le Joker a dit qu’il tuerait tout le monde quand Batman le

relâcherait.’
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 III. THE PRETERIT
• Typical use of the simple past #4: counterfactual processes.

• Just like in French, hypotheses, wishes, etc., are expressed in the past:

• If you knew her you’d know she never quits.

• Si tu la connaissais tu saurais qu’elle n’abandonne jamais.

• This is because the preterit refers to processes that are not real (You don’t know her, but if you did…).

• ‘Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.’ (Aristotle, Nicomachean
Ethics, book VIII)

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• This explains why the preterit is used after ‘I wish’, ‘I’d rather’ or ‘it’s time that…’:

• I wish you didn’t have to go [= but you do have to go];

• I’d rather you remembered to wear pants when you come to my lectures [= you
didn’t remember to wear them today]:

• It’s time I told you the truth [= I haven’t told it yet.]

• This makes sense: you can only wish for things that are not real yet.
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• Typical use of the simple past #5: politeness.

• Just like in French, the past tense is used for requests. Why?

• Because it refers to processes that are not real, not present.

• A request that bears on a process seen as not present will sound less
insistent:
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 III. THE PRETERIT

• « Je veux une baguette. » = rude

• « Je voudrais une baguette. » = better, even without the magic word.

• « Je voulais une baguette. » = not as common.

• «  J’aurais voulu une baguette.  » = quite common among older

French speakers.
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 III. THE PRETERIT

• ‘I wanted to ask if I could borrow your car’ : you still do, otherwise you
wouldn’t be asking.

• Could you pass the salt? vs. Can you pass the salt?: the question bears
on the here and now, but the past tense makes it sound less urgent.

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 III. THE PRETERIT

• English establishes a difference between the present simple and the

present continuous.

• It does so as well between the preterit and the past

progressive.

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 III. THE PRETERIT

• The past continuous is used for the same reasons as the present
continuous.

• But it can also provide a temporal frame for another process.

• I was listening to Bohemian Rhapsody when lightning struck me.

• The second process interrupts the first one.

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 III. THE PRETERIT
• Compare:

• ‘Justin Bieber sang a love song to Taylor Swift. She fainted.’

• ‘Justin Bieber was singing a love song to Taylor Swift when she fainted.’

• Sentence #1 refers to a succession of events.

• In sentence #2, event #2 happens in the middle of event #1: in other words,
event #1 frames event #2.
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