Verb Tenses, Moods, and Aspects

Question

This is a follow-up to two or three discussions that occurred yesterday. Could we please get clarification about what the correct terms in both Spanish and English are? I think this would help some of us who get a little lost in the grammar discussions at times. Some English-language books about Spanish have a bad habit of referring to everything as a tense and only giving the English names for tenses -- but that harks back to the whole discussion about "rules for beginners."

Here is a list as I understand it. Please correct. I'm leaving out compound tenses in the interest of simplicity, but if anyone would like to add them in, that would be great.

Indicative Mood (not a tense)

Present / Presente
Pretérito which has two aspects: Pretérito Indefinado (Preterite, called just Pretérito buy our site conjugator) and Pretérito Imperfecto (Imperfect), which are taught as two different tenses in English-based books.
Conditional / Condicionál
Future / Futuro

Subjunctive Mood

Present Subjunctive / Subjuntivo Presente
Past Subjunctive / Subjuntivo Pretérito - there are two of these, "r" and "s", but this has nothing to do with the two aspects in indicative.
Future Subjunctive / Subjuntivo Futuro - we can forget about it unless we want to talk like Don Quijote. Yea!!!

Imperative is a mood as well, right?

Are there any other aspects besides the two in the Preterite'

Answer 1

What I stated was that Spanish has only one past tense but with two aspects of it (perfective and imperfective). Too many teachers tell their students that Spanish has two past tenses which is not true. My morphology professor would come out of his grave to correct this erroneous teaching.

Natasha said:

The web site is great, but látigo just said that it´s only one tense, [url=http://my.spanishdict.com/forum/topic/show'id=1710195%3ATopic%3A512039&page=2&commentId=1710195%3AComment%3A515523&x=1#1710195Comment515523]here[/url]. Maybe it´s splitting hairs, but whenever there´s a grammatical discussion of any depth on this forum I get confused because English speakers and Spanish speakers use terms differently.

>

Answer 2

Natasha said:

Thank you very much. The reference to Mandarin helps because I learned just barely enough to know about "ma" and "le." (Lots of Chinese friends when I lived in Texas.)

"le" is aspectual, but "ma" is not ("ma" is like a question mark). The other aspectual particles are "guo", "zhe", "jiang",...

Answer 3

Thank you very much. The reference to Mandarin helps because I learned just barely enough to know about "ma" and "le." (Lots of Chinese friends when I lived in Texas.)

Answer 4

The word "pretérito" means, literally speaking, past. A sentence like "las batallas pretéritas..." would be translated as "The former battles...", but here is not a grammatical term.

In grammar, all past tenses are called "preteritos" in our grammars. Spanish has 5 tenses that supposedly refer to the past, and they are all called pretéritos:

pretérito perfecto - perfect tense (the English term is better, in my opinion)
pretérito imperfecto - imperfect
pretérito pluscuamperfecto - pluperfect
pretérito o pretérito indefinido - preterit (the term "indefinido" is absurd, but there you go)
pretérito anterior (barely used, e.g. "hube encontrado")

All the "perfect" ones (the ones using "haber") are supposed to be perfective (I'll explain this now).

The grammatical aspect is a description of flow of time. Some languages specify the aspect with tenses, others changing the ends of the words, others using adverbs, etc. There are many ways of expressing aspect, and some languages are more demanding than others in this respect.

The "main" aspectual distinction (at least in this discussion) is done between perfective and imperfective. Perfective aspect normally refers to a time frame considered as a whole, and viewed from a finished perspective. It can be an instantaneous action, such as "he blinked" or "he began...", a longer time span, like in "They fought for 100 years", habitual actions, like in "He went every day of the week", or other situations.; time length is irrelevant. Imperfective aspect, on the other hand, is not used to focus on the whole action as a whole once finished, but to represent it as it unfolds, so the beginning and the end of the action are generally omitted when expressing this aspect, because they are irrelevant, like in "I am enjoying this" or "I was happy", where there we have no interest in informing others about the whole finished process, from the beginning to the end, but to see it in action. A simple "I was happy for two hours, but then he ruined it" would turn the previous sentence into a perfective one, because we have switched the focus from the moment, to the whole finished action. In Spanish, this aspectual change is expressed with tense, changing from imperfect to preterit, and this is understood even without "... for two hours"; English here relies on this temporal reference to provide the same idea. So, "Iba todos los días" and "Fui todos los días" are both correct. You use the first if you want to tell the story from inside, as you were going over and over again, or as a finished sequence of events, where you went to a place a number of times in the past, and then stopped. English does this with "I used to go every day" and "I went every day". "To sit down" is perfective; "to be sitting" is imperfective, etc.

Tense is not exclusive of preterit and imperfect: for example, present perfect is perfective both in Spanish and in English. Many verbs express aspect regardless of their tense: "to find" is finished and it has no duration, whereas "to remain" has duration and not necessarily an end. Ok, too many irrelevant details now.

Languages like Chinese have no tenses (yes, no past tense, no future tense...), but they have lots of different aspects. Thus, they can specify with a single particle whether something has been experienced, whether it is still happening, whether it is continuous, whether it will continue in the future, visualize an action from the inside, once finished... Adverbs like "today", "tomorrow", "next year" provide the present/past/future information.

In Spanish, the moods are, officially, indicative, subjunctive and imperative. Indicative declares, subjunctive doesn't declares, and imperative commands.

Answer 5

The web site is great, but látigo just said that it´s only one tense, [url=http://my.spanishdict.com/forum/topic/show'id=1710195%3ATopic%3A512039&page=2&commentId=1710195%3AComment%3A515523&x=1#1710195Comment515523]here[/url]. Maybe it´s splitting hairs, but whenever there´s a grammatical discussion of any depth on this forum I get confused because English speakers and Spanish speakers use terms differently.

Answer 6

Modo indicativo: se divide en tiempos simples y compuestos

tiempos simples:

Presente
Pretérito (pasado)
condicional
futuro

Pretérito Indefinido (Preterite, called just Pretérito buy our site conjugator) and Pretérito Imperfecto (Imperfect), which are taught as two different tenses in English-based books.

They are two different tenses:

compré (indefinido)
compraba (imperfecto)

Imperative is a mood as well, right' Yes

Future Subjunctive / Subjuntiveo Futuro - we can forget about it unless we want to talk like Don Quijote Yes

Are there any other aspects besides the two in the Preterite' Look at this very clear page:

[url=http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modo_indicativo_en_espa%C3%B1ol]http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modo_indicativo_en_espa%C3%B1ol[/url]

Look at the page, Nati, you must also consider the combound tenses.