Tags · Domain Tense and aspect When an event happened, and how it is laid out in time — finished, going on, still bearing on now. Topics with this tag Pathway How does “I have it written” turn into an ordinary past tense? Latin habeō litterās scrīptās means “I have the letter in a written state” — a description of how the letter is now. That sentence became French j’ai écrit la lettre, which reports the writing rather than the letter, and in speech it is now the plain past: the old simple past has gone out of use. The same road runs from Old Japanese -tari to modern -ta. English started down it and stopped: have written is still a perfect, and cannot be used with yesterday. Tense and aspectAuxiliary verbGrammaticalizationReanalysis +1 From a Result to a Past Tense → More in this facet Existence 4Location 2Possession 5Alienability 1Negation 4Indefiniteness 1Quantification 2Perception 2Obligation 1Modality 1Device operation 1Grammatical relations 2Benefaction 1Spatial relation 1
