Variant Meaning Realization of Past Tense in English Language

Abstract

Past Tense is a strong grammatical category. It  is realized by four aspect-tense forms: Simple Past, Past Continuous, Past Perfect and Past Perfect Continuous. The following temporal-aspect variants of the past tense are discussed in the article: Past Tense of a Separate Action, Correlative Past, Iterative Past, Prospective, Exclusive and Inclusive. The compositional and stylistic functions and their characteristics are also discussed in the article. The variants of the verbal forms are defined according to their compositional - stylistic functions such as: narrative, descriptive, dramatic, retrospective and consequent. All the above-mentioned functions are characteristic features of the texts which are given in the past tense. Each variant meaning has its specific role to frame the content and helps to state the inner linguistic relations inside the text. According to the classification of Simple Past, Past Continuous, Past Perfect and Past Perfect Continuous, we can state their compositional and stylistic potential. The qualitative description of the subject, the creation of the additional time sphere, representation of consequent, retrospective and prospective functions.