Further tenses edit
The more complex tenses in Indo-European languages are formed by combining a particular tense of the verb with certain verbal auxiliaries, the most common of which are various forms of "be", various forms of "have", and modal auxiliaries such as English will. Romance and Germanic languages often add "to hold", "to stand", "to go", or "to come" as auxiliary verbs. For example, Spanish uses estar ("to be") with the present gerund to indicate the present continuous. These constructions are often known as complex tenses or compound tenses (a more accurate technical term is periphrastic tenses).
Examples of some generally recognized Indo-European tenses using the verb "to go" are shown in the table below.
| Tense | Germanic: English: to go |
Romance: Spanish: ir |
Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Present simple | I go. | (Yo) voy. | In most languages this is used for most present indicative uses. In English, it is used mainly to express habit or ability (I play the guitar). |
| Present continuous | I am going. | (Yo) estoy yendo. | This form is prevalent in English to express current action, but is absent or rarer in other Indo-European languages, which prefer the simple present tense. The continuous is more an aspect than a tense and is included here only because of its prevalence in English to substitute for the simple present. |
| Present perfect | I have gone. | (Yo) he ido. | Common past compound tense. In some languages indicates recent past, in others indicates an unknown past time. |
| Present perfect continuous | I have been going. | This is used to express that an event or habit started at some time in the past and continues to the present. | |
| Preterite/Aorist | I went. | (Yo) fui. | In English, unlike other languages with aorist tenses, this implies that the action took place in the past and that it is not taking place now. |
| Past continuous | I was going. | (Yo) estaba yendo. | |
| Pluperfect (past perfect) | I had gone. | (Yo) había ido. | This expresses a past action that was completed before some other past event. |
| Past perfect continuous | I had been going. | This is usually coupled with a duration, indicating that an event was ongoing for a specific time and was completed before a specific event. | |
| Imperfect | I used to go. | (Yo) iba. | The English construction I used to go has a very restricted use, compared to the imperfect tenses of other languages, which often translate better as I was going, I would go, or even I went. |
| Conditional | I would go. | (Yo) iría. | The conditional is regarded as a tense in the grammars of some languages, although others treat it as a mood. Notice that it can refer to the past, for example in reported speech: I warned him that I would call the Police if he did not turn down the music. |
| Future | I will go. | (Yo) iré. | This can be used to express intention, prediction, and other senses. |
| Future continuous | I will be going. | ||
| Future perfect | I will have gone. | (Yo) habré ido. | This expresses a future action that will be completed before another future action. |