PAST TENSE

The past tense (abbreviated pst) is a grammatical tense whose principal function is to place an action or
situation in past time. In languages which have a past tense, it thus provides a grammatical means of
indicating that the event being referred to took place in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense
include the English verbs sang, went and was.

In some languages, the grammatical expression of past tense is combined with the expression of
other categories such as mood and aspect (see tense–aspect–mood). Thus a language may have several
types of past tense form, their use depending on what aspectual or other additional information is to be
encoded. French, for example, has a compound past (passé composé) for expressing completed events,
an imperfect for expressing events which were ongoing or repeated in the past, as well as several other
past forms.

Some languages that grammaticalise for past tense do so by inflecting the verb, while others do
so periphrastically using auxiliary verbs, also known as "verbal operators" (and some do both, as in the
example of French given above). Not all languages grammaticalise verbs for past tense – Mandarin
Chinese, for example, mainly uses lexical means (words like "yesterday" or "last week") to indicate that
something took place in the past, although use can also be made of the tense/aspect
markers le and guo.

The "past time" to which the past tense refers generally means the past relative to the moment of
speaking, although in contexts where relative tense is employed (as in some instances of indirect
speech) it may mean the past relative to some other time being under discussion.[1] A language's past
tense may also have other uses besides referring to past time; for example, in English and certain other
languages, the past tense is sometimes used in referring to hypothetical situations, such as in condition
clauses like If you loved me ..., where the past tense loved is used even though there may be no
connection with past time.

Some languages grammatically distinguish the recent past from remote past with separate tenses. There
may be more than two distinctions.

In some languages, certain past tenses can carry an implication that the result of the action in question
no longer holds. For example, in the Bantu language Chichewa, use of the remote past
tense ánáamwalíra "he died" would be surprising since it would imply that the person was no longer
dead.[2] This kind of past tense is known as discontinuous past. Similarly certain imperfective past
tenses (such as the English "used to") can carry an implication that the action referred to no longer takes
place.[3]

(Wikipedia)