The Form of Simple Past Tense
Drive Eat
Fall Drove
Ate Fell
Be Bring
Buy Catch
Do Fly
Waswere Brought
Bought Caught
Did Flew
Many verbs
have consonant
and vowel
changes in the pst.
Based on the examples above, the verb be is the exception of irregular verb. This irregular verb is used differently than other
irregular verb in affirmative, negative and interrogative statement.
c.
The simple past tense of verb be 1 Affirmative Statement
For affirmative statement the formula as follow:
Example: Mr. Erwin was a pilot one year ago.
They were in the laboratories at 7 o‟clock.
2 Negative Statement
For negative statement the formula as follow:
Example: You were not there last night.
Mr. Heru was not in the office yesterday.
Subject + waswere + adjectiveadverb of placenoun
Subject + waswere +not + adjectiveadverb of placenoun
3 Interrogative Statement
For interrogative statement the formula as follow:
Examples: Were you a secretary?
Wasn‟t the dog fed this afternoon?
The examples above show that the use of “was” is used for the
pronouns I, he, she, it, this, and that, however, the be of “were” is
used for pronoun such as; you, we, these, and those. So, the use of “was” is only used for the singular noun and the use of “were” is
only
. 4.
The Usage of Simple Past Tense
The use of simple past tense is declared by some linguist experts. One of them is Sydney Greenbaum who stated that the simple past tense is used
to refer to a situation set at a definite time in the past, such as:
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a The even past is used with dynamic verb sense to refer to a
single definite event in the past. The even may take place over an extended period or at the point of time.
For example: The train left at 7 a.m b
The habitual past is used with dynamic verb senses to refer to past events that repeatedly occur.
For example: We spent our holiday in Lombok when we were children.
34
Sidney Greenbaum and Randolph Quirk, Student’s Grammar of the English
Language, Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 1990, p. 50
Waswere + Subject + adjectiveadverb of placenoun + ? Wasn’tweren’t + Subject + adjectiveadverb of
placenoun +?
c The state past is used with state verb senses to refer to a single
unbroken state of affairs in the past. For example: She once liked writing poems.
Another explanation stated by Douglas Biber and his friends about the use of simple past tense that, “Past tense also has a common special use,
when it is backshifted from the present in reported speech or thought. That is, reports of earlier or thought can be given in the past tense, when the
original quote in the case of speech was presumably in the present tense. in these cases, the tense of the verb in the indirect quote is adapted to agree
with the past tense of the reporting verb;
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Example:
A girl at work said she worked at Woolworths. Direct speech “I work at Woolworths”
Then the next day he said he no longer loved me
Direct speech “I no longer love you.” From the explanations above, the write concludes that there are
several uses of simple past tense, they are: to describe single completed actions, to show repeated events completed in the past and no longer
happening, to talk about actions that happened in a sequence in the past, and to state indirect speech.